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.
The present time is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
Everything that we perceive around us is struggling towards freedom, from the atom to the man, from the insentient, lifeless particle of matter to the highest existence on earth, the human soul. The whole universe is in fact the result of this struggle for freedom.
Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?
I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
Better use has been made of association and this powerful instrument of action has been applied for more varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world.
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