Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal" which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.
Interpretation
Great ideals often disguise intentions to harm others, while true quality stands on its own without embellishment.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell critiques the way society venerates certain ideals, suggesting that they often serve as a facade for justifying harm towards opponents. He implies that, much like good wine requires no advertising, genuine morals and values should manifest naturally without the need for excessive promotion or justification. This perspective invites reflection on the authenticity of our motivations and beliefs.
In practice
In a debate on ethics, this quote can illustrate how ideals can mask harmful intentions.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.
The number of guests at dinner should not be less than the number of the Graces nor exceed that of the Muses, i.e., it should begin with three and stop at nine.
If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions β if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before β then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.
It is hard to imagine a world without forgiveness. Without forgiveness life would be unbearable. Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.
The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
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