Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Interpretation
Disdain for happiness often reflects a deeper disdain for others and humanity itself.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell suggests that when individuals express contempt for happiness, it often mirrors their underlying contempt for the happiness of others and, more broadly, for humanity. This disdain can be seen as a sophisticated mask hiding emotions like hatred, revealing a complex relationship to joy and social connection.
In practice
In a discussion about social attitudes, this quote can highlight the dangers of dismissing others' happiness.
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.
Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.
The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.
Things of which there is sight, hearing, apprehension, these I prefer.
Never take over the world to tamper with it. Those who want to tamper with it are not fit to take over the world.
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.
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