It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
Interpretation
Thought is constrained by societal pressures, particularly economic ones.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell highlights the idea that the freedom of thought is greatly limited when expressing certain opinions can lead to severe consequences, such as losing one's job or financial stability. He suggests that true intellectual freedom is compromised when individuals feel compelled to conform to widely accepted views for the sake of survival, thus revealing the tension between personal beliefs and societal expectations.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of free expression in academia.
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.
In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.
Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.
He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.
He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.
You can win the rat race but you're still a rat.
The strongest continuous thread in America's political tradition is skepticism about government.
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