If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
Interpretation
True happiness in philosophy must stem from compassion, not from envy or resentment towards others.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell critiques the motivations behind Marx's ideology, suggesting that a genuine philosophy aimed at happiness should be rooted in kindness and understanding rather than a desire for the suffering of others. He implies that Marx's focus on the proletariat's happiness was undermined by a disdain for the bourgeois, which detracted from the true essence of a philosophy that should promote universal well-being.
In practice
In a lecture discussing ethical philosophies, one might quote Russell to illustrate the importance of compassion in philosophical thought.
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.
PROCTOR--he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!
My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
It seems to me that an unjust law is no law at all.
I have no religious belief myself, but I don't think we should fight about it. In particular, I think that we should not rubbish moderate religious leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury because I think we all agree that extreme fundamentalism is a threat, and we need all the allies we can muster against it.
God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.
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