Quote

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Bertrand Russell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bertrand Russell
Age: 97 †
Born: 1872
Born: May 18
Died: 1970
Died: February 2
Analytic Philosopher
Autobiographer
Epistemologist
Essayist
Journalist
Logician
Mathematician
Metaphysician
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Tryleg
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Russell
Bertrand Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Bertrand Russell
Earl Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Humor
Submission
Respect
Unnecessary
Goes
Tyranny
Opinion
Avoid
Public
Prison
Keep
Rule
Anything
Necessary
Voluntary
Beyond
Starvation

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

Image
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Bertrand Russell
Image
I do not think any reasonable person can doubt that in India, China and Japan, if the knowledge of birth control existed, the birthrate would fall very rapidly
Bertrand Russell
Image
Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent
Bertrand Russell
Image
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell
Image
There was, I think, never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.
Bertrand Russell
Image
In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Measures of sterilization should, in my opinion, be very definitely confined to persons who are mentally defective
Bertrand Russell
Image
dont let the old break you let the love make you
Bertrand Russell
Image
All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides this No Man's Land is philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts 'sins' and others 'virtue' on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.
Bertrand Russell
Image
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Bertrand Russell
Image
We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.
Bertrand Russell
Image
It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter second, telling other people to do so.
Bertrand Russell