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.
One country ... one ideology, one system is not sufficient. It is helpful to have a variety of different approaches ... We can then make a joint effort to solve the problems of the whole of humankind.
A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.
Government acquisition of food supplies in time of war is no less important than conscription. Equity is the fundamental principle applicable to both these essential phases of war administration.
Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
For a lot of white people, just suggesting that being white has meaning will trigger a deep, defensive response. And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit.
I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.
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