Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.
Interpretation
Public opinion can be oppressive, particularly to those who are anxious about it, rather than to those who are indifferent.
This quote by Bertrand Russell emphasizes that public opinion has a tyrannical quality, particularly towards individuals who show fear or concern about it. Those who are indifferent to societal judgment are less likely to be affected by the power of public opinion, while those who are anxious may subject themselves to its pressure and criticism more willingly, thus becoming victims of a collective tyranny.
In practice
In a debate about social media's impact, one might use this quote to illustrate how people's fear of judgment shapes their online behavior.
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.
To tell the truth is revolutionary.
I loved when Bush came out and said, 'We are losing the war against drugs.' You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it.
In today's highly interdependent world, individuals and nations can no longer resolve many of their problems by themselves. We need one another. It is our collective and individual responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker members, and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we all live.
Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.
Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness
If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists
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