Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Interpretation
Drunkenness serves as an escape from reality but ultimately leads to destructive consequences.
Bertrand Russell's quote highlights the perilous allure of alcohol, suggesting that indulging in drunkenness is a form of self-destruction. While it may provide a fleeting escape from lifeβs hardships, this temporary state ultimately robs individuals of their clarity, agency, and connection to reality, likening it to a minor death or 'temporary suicide'.
In practice
During a speech about the dangers of addiction at a community center, one might quote Russell to emphasize the seriousness of alcohol abuse.
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.
If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.
To the best of my judgment, I have labored for, and not against, the Union. As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us is the difference of circumstances.
In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.
Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.
I just know that there are plenty of people who are in terrible trouble and can't get out. And so I'm impatient with those who think that it's easy for people to get out of trouble.
The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.
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