The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Interpretation
Confidence can often come from ignorance rather than wisdom.
This quote by Bertrand Russell highlights the irony of certainty and doubt in human nature. It suggests that those who lack understanding, represented as 'fools and fanatics,' often show an unwavering confidence, while more knowledgeable individuals experience hesitation and doubt about their beliefs, emphasizing the paradox of ignorance and wisdom in society.
In practice
In a discussion about political beliefs, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of healthy skepticism.
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.
Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.
A traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing.
Itβs a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
First, we must do our own personal work, then we tend the necessary work of our family, then our community, then the world.
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