The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his varied
and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and
freedom of thought.” On December 11 of that year, 78-year-old Russell
took the podium in Stockholm to receive the grand accolade.

His acceptance speech is one of the finest packets of human thought ever delivered from a stage.

"All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious
theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is
possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I
say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of
duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be
dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only,
or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole
system of their desires with their relative strengths."

Russell points to four such infinite desires:

1. Acquisitiveness
2. Rivalry 
3. Vanity
4. Love of power  
   

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