Bertrand Russell Quotes

According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals--just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.

If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

Men and nations cannot bear to feel inferior.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors…. The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood/

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

There is a cowardly propensity in the human heart that delights in oppressing somebody else, and in the gratification of this base desire we always select a victim that can be outraged with safety.

I have come to think of violence as a self-perpetuating mania of the power of the aggressive over those less strong.

No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.

Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied.

The people rate strength before everything.

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims

We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.

I have plumbed the depth of human cowardice and I realized that there is only one way to be right, and that is to be in power.

Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,-- Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.

Power wears out those who do not have it.

I do like to hit people-I like the explosion of power and energy, and the feeling that I am untouchable because I can hurt people. But I hate that part of myself, because it is the part of me that is the most broken

Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another.

Structures can be manipulated for ill as well, especially when people are dealing with issues of power, or control, or violence.

We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.

You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.