Time & Perspective Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell’s line is a scalpel aimed at a particular moral theater: the way self-denial can curdle into domination. The sentence turns on an almost comic inversion. If you ban ordinary pleasures - sex, drink, comfort, the small anarchies of the body - you don’t eliminate desire; you reroute it. What gets licensed, even sanctified, is the pleasure that can masquerade as duty: the pleasure of command.

The subtext is anti-romantic about asceticism. Russell refuses the flattering story that the ascetic is simply higher-minded. He suggests a psychological conservation law: appetite doesn’t vanish; it migrates. And power, unlike “the pleasures of sense,” is uniquely compatible with public virtue. It wears uniforms, carries scriptures, sits on committees. You can hunger for it while insisting you’re only protecting souls, saving the nation, defending the faith. That’s why the word “vice” bites. He’s not saying power is necessary; he’s saying it’s tempting in precisely the way ascetics claim to be immune to temptation.

Context matters: Russell is a secular liberal writing in the long shadow of European churches, imperial bureaucracy, and totalizing ideologies that demanded purity. He had watched moral certainty become a political technology. “Throughout history” is not casual throat-clearing; it’s indictment-by-pattern, a reminder that institutions built on renunciation often end up expert at surveillance, punishment, and control.

The wit is in the moral judo. The ascetic condemns indulgence, then indulges anyway - just in the one pleasure that can call itself righteousness.