Life & Mortality Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell’s “slave” isn’t chained to a master so much as to a metaphysics: time, fate, death. The line lands with the cool brutality of someone who thinks modern people have smuggled ancient gods back into their lives under respectable names. Time becomes a tyrant, fate a bureaucrat, death the final auditor. Why worship them? Because the “slave” has been trained to experience himself as small, thin, and replaceable. If you can’t locate real agency or value inside your own life, you bow to whatever seems bigger.

The real sting is in the last clause: “all his thoughts are of things which they devour.” Russell isn’t warning against mortality in the abstract; he’s diagnosing a habit of mind. Fixate on status, possessions, future outcomes, reputations, the story other people tell about you, and you end up devoting your inner life to objects that time will erode anyway. The devotion is self-reinforcing: the more you invest in the perishable, the more inevitable the devourer looks, and the more “fate” feels like an explanation instead of a dodge.

In context, this is Russell’s secular moral project: to replace fear-based reverence with a sturdier humanism. He’s arguing that freedom begins as an interior reallocation of attention, from what ends to what can be lived: clarity, affection, courage, curiosity, the kinds of values that don’t vanish just because the clock moves. Time and death remain undefeated, but they don’t have to be enthroned.