No opinion has ever been too errant to become a creed.
Interpretation
Opinions can become widely accepted beliefs, regardless of their validity.
This quote by Bertrand Russell suggests that any opinion, no matter how misguided or incorrect, has the potential to transform into a belief system or creed held by people. It reflects on the nature of beliefs, emphasizing that the power of opinion can lead to widely accepted ideologies, which may not always be based on truth or reason.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about the impact of social media on public opinions.
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.
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.
What we see in the outer is but a reflection of the inner, because we surround ourselves with a picture of our own beliefs. In other words, we manifest in general what we seriously think and believe. So if we want to find out what our habitual thinking is like, we have but to look around us and ask ourselves what we really see.
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
Nada is found within. It is a music without strings which plays in the body. It penetrates the inner and outer and leads you away from illusion.
There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.
It is not the being seen of men that is wrong, but doing these things for the purpose of being seen of men. The problem with the hypocrite is his motivation.
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