A Quote by Bertrand Russell

Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.

Bertrand Russell

Quote Topics

Attempt Disguised Ethical Force Fundamentally Give However Legislative Metaphysics Our Own Wishes

Quote Author

Bertrand Russell
British - Celebrity
May 18, 1872 - February 2, 1970

Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In the legislative branch, you make the laws... and our role as judges is to interpret the law, not to inject our own policy preferences. So our task is to give an honest construction to what laws are passed by the Legislature.

Thomas Hardiman

Any attempts by any government to change Community legislation to its own wishes are doomed to failure following the extension of policy areas now subject to majority voting... In our opinion, this must have serious implications for the traditional view of Parliament as a legislative body sovereignty.

Margaret Thatcher

Many thought that the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era, among other watershed moments, would have fundamentally done away with the racist structures that have long oppressed black people. However, we know that has been far from the case.

Opal Tometi

Global warming may be a 'crisis,' even 'the most pressing environmental problem of our time.' ... Indeed, it may ultimately affect nearly everyone on the planet in some potentially adverse way, and it may be that governments have done too little to address it. It is not a problem, however, that has escaped the attention of policymakers in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our Government, who continue to consider regulatory, legislative, and treaty-based means of addressing global climate change.

John Roberts

And yet, for some time now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?

Rainer Maria Rilke

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

Margaret Atwood

It is monstrous that custom should force us to display our faces ostentatiously, however worn and wrinkled and mean they may be, whilst carefully concealing all our other parts, however shapely and well preserved.

George Bernard Shaw

Like dreams, farces show the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes.

Eric Bentley

It so happens that after a certain stage, we have to give in to the wishes of the people rather than your own satisfaction. I look at it as my responsibility to satisfy the wishes of the people more than mine.

Chiranjeevi

The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.

Gilles Deleuze

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Christopher Hitchens

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

H. L. Mencken

To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress.