A democrat need not believe that the majority will always reach a wise decision. He should however believe in the necessity of accepting the decision of the majority, be it wise or unwise, until such a time that the majority reaches another decision.
Interpretation
Democracy requires acceptance of majority decisions, regardless of their wisdom.
Bertrand Russell emphasizes the importance of accepting the decisions made by the majority in a democratic society, even if those decisions are not always wise. He advocates for the belief that democratic processes are essential, and one must respect the outcomes until new decisions are made, underscoring the dynamic nature of public opinion and decision-making in governance.
In practice
In a debate about voting outcomes, to highlight the importance of respecting majority decisions.
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.
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.
No matter how many toys we amass we leave them behind when we die, just as we leave a broken environment, an economy that only benefits the richest, and a legacy of empowering greed over goodness. It is now time to commit to following a new path.
One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians.
Vastly more important than all questions with regard to methods of preaching is the root question as to what it is that shall be preached.
Where there is no conflict, there is no fault.
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