Bertrand Russell Quotes

We must wait for the slow progress of moral causes

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.

Reform is born of need, not pity.

Progressive change in this country has never come from above.

Let the good ideas seep in, turning the barbarians [Khmer] into civilized people. As for winning the hearts of the people, and teaching them, we plan to do this rather slowly.

An idea consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of humanity in the next

What I have been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism.

Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counter-power, or through a change in their hearts and minds, or change will not come.

It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action.

If you want change, and you want things to get better across the country, there's different ways to go about it.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.

Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution - and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

Take empathy, something added to human nature very recently and moving as we speak. Less than 300 years ago, Christians were enjoying watching a bear and dogs fight in a pit, racing Jews like horses, and had a life expectancy of less than 50 years. Today there are vegans who won't kill a fly, and yet wars too.

[O]ne of the most problematic unexamined assumptions of modern-day progressivism is the idea that outrage is the most powerful motivation for progress and must therefore be continually cultivated and encouraged.

The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.

He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray

For you will never be what you ought to be until they [your fellow humans] are what they ought to be.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.