One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that while public opinion must be acknowledged for practical survival, excessive adherence to it equates to surrendering to an oppressive force.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell argues that the fear of societal judgment or public opinion should not control our actions beyond what is necessary for survival and societal acceptance. He emphasizes that while it is wise to consider the views of others to avoid dire consequences, such as starvation or imprisonment, to do so excessively is to willingly accept an unwarranted dominance over our lives. This perspective encourages individuals to maintain their autonomy and to question the pressures of conformity.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of individuality in the workplace.
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.
What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.
A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.