Bertrand Russell Quotes

In science the new is an advance; but in morals, as contradicting our inner ideals and historic idols, it is ever a retrogression.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

When you look at the times in history when change was brought about, there were two factors: crisis and leadership.

History pays more attention to reformers than others. We pay more attention to dissenters too.

I fear … that morals do not of necessity advance hand in hand with the sciences.

Reform means difficulties. History moves often by leaps, then it moves slowly, because the resistance is organizing itself.

Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight...

Islam and its tradition have until now encountered modernity as a cultural aggression (al-ghazw al-fikri), not as a historical phenomenon.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue, -- that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments. The agents which the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was the one fly that helped to spoil the ointment. Then, amid all this crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery.

In order to make the changes work, the majority of members of society that has entered into the changes must wake up every morning with a feeling of the great historical moment, with the feeling of something big and extraordinary.

To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.

The beginnings of moral enterprises in this world are never to be measured by any apparent growth. ... At length comes the sudden ripeness and the full success, and he who is called in at the final moment deems this success his own. He is but the reaper and not the labourer. Other men sowed and tilled and he but enters into their labours.

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

Think of US slavery in 1850, or the subjection of women. Both of these injustices could have been - and were! - defended by pointing out, quite correctly, that this situation of slaves and women had been improving throughout the preceding century. Slaves, in particular, were worked less hard, beaten and raped less frequently, better fed, and less often ripped apart from their families. So would a celebration of moral progress have been appropriate in 1850? Surely not. Slavery could have been and should have been abolished - then, if not before.

Throughout history, people with new ideas—who think differently and try to change things—have always been called troublemakers.

We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.

There is no history of how bad became better.

Progress is a farce because man's head and hand have created wonders that stun the imagination, but his heart does not keep step and his morals undo all that his mind has wrought.

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them.

Ages employed in making history have no time for studying it.

Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.