What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
Interpretation
The collective beliefs of a community can constrain and shape the actions of individuals.
This quote by William James suggests that the shared beliefs and values of a community can significantly influence and limit the behavior and thoughts of individuals within that community. It highlights the powerful hold that societal norms and expectations can have, almost as though they grip individuals tightly, restricting their freedom and autonomy.
In practice
During a speech highlighting social issues, you could use this quote to emphasize how collective beliefs shape individual actions.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
In almost all sciences the fundamental knowledge is either found in earliest times or is still being sought.
Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.
Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.
When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.'
If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.