There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of compassion, knowledge, and hope in society while warning against accepting comforting falsehoods.
Bertrand Russell's quote outlines essential qualities that modern society should embrace, such as compassion for others and a genuine desire for everyone to find happiness. He advocates for the pursuit of knowledge based on truth rather than comfort found in myths, urging a courageous hope and a creative spirit as vital to progress and fulfillment in life.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech advocating for social justice.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.
Not only the words (vocabula) which the Holy Spirit and Scripture use are divine, but also the phrasing
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.
Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.
To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.
The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
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