Political ideals

Mental development may be helped or hindered by outside influences. The outside influences that help are those merely provide encouragement or mental food or opportunities for exercising mental faculties. The influences that hinder are those that interfere with growth by applying any kind of force, whether discipline or authority of fear or the tyranny of public opinion or the necessity of engaging in some totally incongenial occupation. Worst of all influences are those that thwart or twist a man's fundamental impulse, wich is what shows itself as conscience in the moral sphere; such influences are likely to do a man an inward danger from which he will never recover.

Bertrand Russell

1872 - 1970