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If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

— Bertrand Russell Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)

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More quotes by Bertrand Russell

Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from.

Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918)

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

A Free Man's Worship (1903)

My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.

Greek Exercises (1888)

Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.

Power: A New Social Analysis (1938)

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Bertrand Russell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.