Our comments on life and affairs were bright and amusing, but brittle… because there was no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them. Bertie [Bertrand Russell] in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally. A discussion of practical affairs on these lines was really very boring. And a discussion of the human heart which ignored so many of its deeper and blinder passions, both good and bad, was scarcely more interesting.
John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings vol X p449 (via unapologetic-book)