Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires
Interpretation
This quote highlights the idea that many political leaders gain power by convincing people they have selfless motives.
Bertrand Russell reflects on the nature of political leadership, suggesting that many leaders rise to power not solely based on their abilities or policies, but by manipulating public perception. They create an impression of altruism, which allows them to garner support from the masses who believe in their supposed selflessness, even if their true motivations may be more self-serving. This insight invites a critical examination of the relationship between perceptions and reality in politics.
In practice
During a political debate, to illustrate a candidate's misleading rhetoric.
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.
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
Meat is not agreeable to the wise: it has a nauseating odor, it causes a bad reputation, it is food for the carnivorous; I say this, Mahamati, it is not to be eaten.
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs).
You have to be able to interact with people whose politics you disagree with.
It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.
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