The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Interpretation
Popularity does not equate to truth; commonly held beliefs can often be foolish.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell emphasizes that just because a belief is widely accepted does not mean it is valid or sensible. He critiques the tendency of people to accept popular opinions without questioning their validity, suggesting that the majority often lacks wisdom, thus making commonly held beliefs potentially misguided or absurd.
In practice
In a debate about climate change, you could use this quote to challenge popular misconceptions.
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.
While our world is shaking and crumbling, we need to realize that one thing will never change, and that is God. He is the same today as he was ten million years ago, and will be the same ten million years from today.
Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to.
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.
There is nothing more horrifying than stupidity in action.
There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.