Bertrand Russell Quotes

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

The most powerful idea in the modern world: All men are created equal.

I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

They don't stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery.

In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.

I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognizes the principle of slavery.

Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, till not a slave shall on this earth be found.

I wish all men to be free. I wish the material prosperity of the already free which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring.

When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute a state. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.

Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men;.... Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.

They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping, do not wake him lest he be dreaming of freedom. I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him freedom.

Equality is a mortuary word.

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.

In the form of security and sufficiency for the men who labor to the profit of others, and in the form of registering and controlling them in the form of an organized public supervision of their labor, slavery is already afoot. When slavery shall succeed it will succeed through the acquiescence of those who will be enslaved, for they will prefer sufficiency and security with enslavement, to freedom, responsibility, insecurity and the threat of insufficiency.

The laboring man and the trade-unionist, if I understand him, asks only equality before the law. Class legislation and unequal privilege, though expressly in his favor, will in the end work no benefit to him or to society.

While we are fighting for freedom, we must see, among other things, that labor is free.

Every nation is destined, by the law of God and humanity, to form a free and equal community of brothers.

Let us take care of our rights and we therein take care of our prosperity. Slavery is ever preceded by sleep

I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.

For humanity has moved forward to an era when wrong and slavery are being displaced, and reason and justice are being recognized as the rule of life.

In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists.

Solidarity among the male and female workers, a general cause, general goals, a general path to that goal - that is the solution to the "woman" question in the working-class environment.

I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth; that freedom of enquiry will produce liberality of conduct; that mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were, made for the few; and that they will not continue slaves in one part of the globe, when they can become freemen in another.