“What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.”

Quoted on Who Said That?, BBC TV (8 August 1958)
1950s

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Do you have more details about the quote "What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices." by Bertrand Russell?

Bertrand Russell562

logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970

Albert Caraco (1919–1971) French-Uruguayan philosopher

Ma confession, Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, p. 92
Ma confession (1975)

“As a traditional leader, I take slight that, at times, our traditional authority have been abused and exploited by the powers that be. While our traditional authority has always been respected, sadly at times, it has also been abused.”

Naiqama Lalabalavu (1953) Fijian politician

Parliamentary speech, 17 November 2005 (excerpts)

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

In this work are exhibited in a very high degree the two most engaging powers of an author. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. ~ Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Alexander Pope" from Lives of the English Poets (1781) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/lvpc10.txt <br class="br">Misattributed

“Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. IV (1928)

“Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 1
Context: Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.