Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
Interpretation
The quote warns against allowing anger to cloud our judgment when confronted with differing opinions.
Bertrand Russell's quote highlights the importance of self-reflection and critical thinking when facing disagreements. Instead of reacting with anger, he suggests that we should examine our beliefs and ensure they are supported by evidence. This encourages a more open-minded approach to discussions and helps prevent emotional responses from distorting our understanding of differing viewpoints.
In practice
In a debate club meeting while discussing controversial topics.
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.
Am I a pessimist? Not at all. I am convinced that the history of the human race, no matter how tragic, will ultimately lead to the Kingdom of God. I am convinced that all the works of humankind will be reintegrated in the work of God, and that each of us, no matter how sinful, will ultimately be saved.
Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.
Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
You've confused a war on your religion with not always getting everything you want.
It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.
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