“People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim." - Bertrand Russell

“But I think all mankind utterly vile. The Bolsheviks, till I knew them, seemed better; now they don’t. ... People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim. The world is rushing down into barbarism, and there seems nothing to do but keep alive civilization in one’s corner, as the Irish did in the 7th and 8th centuries.”
- Bertrand Russell (letter to his lover Ottoline Morrell. December 17, 1920)