You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a presidential election is produced by the votes of single electors.
Interpretation
Believing in the potential for individual action is essential for societal improvement.
Bertrand Russell's quote emphasizes the importance of individual belief and action in contributing to the creation of a better society. He likens the influence of good individuals to the electoral process, where every single vote counts toward the final outcome, suggesting that collective progress can only come from the commitment and goodness of each person within the community.
In practice
During a motivational speech about community service.
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.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
I never have felt that people should feel that they are better than others, simply because they just happen to possess a larger share of material items and monetary wealth than others less fortunate. I believe in sharing, assisting, and just lending a helping hand to people.
Fly, dotard, fly! With thy wise dreams and fables of the sky.
With all of the history of war, and the human race's history unfortunately has been a good deal more war than peace, with nuclear weapons distributed all through the world, and available, and the strong reluctance of any people to accept defeat, I see the possibility in the 1970's of the President of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons.
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you've been labeled a felon.
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