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.
Interpretation
Believing without evidence can lead to prejudice and a closed mind.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell emphasizes the dangers of adhering to beliefs regardless of evidence supporting them. Such an attitude fosters hostility towards factual information that contradicts one's preconceived notions, ultimately resulting in a narrow-minded approach to understanding the world.
In practice
In a debate about climate change, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of being open to evidence.
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.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.
Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.
All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment.
Without order nothing can exist-without chaos nothing can evolve. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Sometimes, when I am tired of so many oscillations, I look for refuge in a word which I begin to love for itself. Resting in the heart of words, seeing clearly into the cell of a word, feeling that the word is the seed of a life, a growing dawn... The poet Vandercammen says all that in a line: "A word can be a dawn and even a sure shelter."
You must be a lotus, unfolding its petals when the sun rises in the sky, unaffected by the slush where it is born or even the water which sustains it!
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