It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
Interpretation
Thought is constrained by societal pressures, particularly economic ones.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell highlights the idea that the freedom of thought is greatly limited when expressing certain opinions can lead to severe consequences, such as losing one's job or financial stability. He suggests that true intellectual freedom is compromised when individuals feel compelled to conform to widely accepted views for the sake of survival, thus revealing the tension between personal beliefs and societal expectations.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of free expression in academia.
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.
Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.
The path to paradise begins in hell.
Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.
The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and pertubations; to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future.
But we know that freedom cannot be served by the devices of the tyrant. As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedoms defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.
Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of Being.
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