Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
Interpretation
Happiness is often tied to conflict with others, suggesting a darker side to human satisfaction.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell reflects on the complicated nature of happiness, implying that many individuals find joy through the presence of negativity towards others. This suggests that some people derive a sense of well-being from feeling superior or more fortunate than others, highlighting a potentially toxic aspect of human happiness that thrives on division and animosity.
In practice
This quote can be used during a discussion on human behavior in psychology lectures.
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.
Over-anxiety ultimately banishes every trace of joy from life.
Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.
There are hunters, and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.
When you are ignorant about something, to know that you are ignorant about it - that is knowledge.
A wise man does not chatter with one whose mind is sick.
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