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.
I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
Selfishness and fear are at the root of (pro-abortion) legislation...We in the Church have a great struggle to defend life...life is a gift not a threat.
Someone who can search for something is happy. Searching gives a meaning to life. Nowadays itβs not so easy to find something you might be looking for. The most important thing, however, is the search itself, the way you take. Itβs not so important where it leads. thatβs why my characters are always looking for something, maybe only a cat, a sheep or a wife, but that is at least the beginning of a story.
The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
The news isn't there to tell you what happened. It's there to tell you what it wants you to hear or what it thinks you want to hear.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.