Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that cruel opinions stem from a person's own cruel nature.
Bertrand Russell's quote highlights the disturbing tendency of individuals to rationalize cruelty through their opinions. It implies that when people hold views that support cruel behavior, those opinions are often a reflection of their inner impulses and character, rather than an objective or ethical stance. This serves as a cautionary observation about the moral implications of aligning one's beliefs with harmful actions or ideologies.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the ethical implications of social media opinions that promote violence.
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.
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
For tyme ylost may nought recovered be.
Don't seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.
What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
Every rose that is sweet-scented within, That rose is telling of the secrets of the Universal.
I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
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