Bertrand Russell Quotes

The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

Morally considered, laughter is next to the Ten Commandments.

A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.

A man may not transgress the bounds of major morals, but may make errors in minor morals.

A different vision of ethics is that of a collection of resources people can use to act better. The resources might be firm rules that could always be relied on. Or they might be ideals that could often be followed without thinking but that sometimes conflicted with one another.

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

The relationship between the films and the individual Commandments [is] a tentative one. The films should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our daily lives.

Renunciation is the very basis upon which ethics stands. There never was an ethical code preached which had not renunciation for its basis.

The very essence of our civilization is that we give a paramount place to morality in all our affairs, public or private.

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

It is well for us if we have learned to listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes, but there are crises in all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" of the decalogue which the founders wrote on the gateposts of their commonwealth.

Morals and lights are our first necessities.

Morality is always higher than law and we cannot forget this ever.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define the "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival".

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.