Love & Passion Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell lands this line like a scalpel: cool, statistical-sounding, and therefore harder to dismiss as mere provocation. The shock isn’t just in comparing marriage to prostitution; it’s in the way he treats “undesired sex” as a measurable social cost, the kind polite society prefers to render invisible. By framing marriage as “the commonest mode of livelihood,” he strips it of romance and recasts it as an economic institution - one that historically funneled women into dependency. The subtext is brutal: when survival hinges on staying married, consent can become procedural, not freely given.

The sentence works because Russell refuses the usual moral hierarchy. Prostitution is publicly stigmatized, marriage publicly sanctified, yet he suggests the sanctified institution may generate more coerced intimacy precisely because it’s sheltered by respectability and law. Inside marriage, the coercion doesn’t need a pimp or a street corner; it can arrive as duty, guilt, religion, property relations, or the absence of alternatives. “Probably” is doing strategic work here: it signals intellectual caution while still aiming the reader at the conclusion he wants them to feel in their gut.

Context matters. Russell wrote amid early 20th-century debates about women’s rights, divorce reform, sexual ethics, and the slow unravelling of Victorian prudery. Marital rape exemptions and limited economic opportunities for women were not abstractions; they were policy and custom. His intent is to force a recalculation: if we’re serious about sexual morality, we can’t outsource our outrage to the margins. We have to inspect the mainstream.