Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Interpretation
Drunkenness serves as an escape from reality but ultimately leads to destructive consequences.
Bertrand Russell's quote highlights the perilous allure of alcohol, suggesting that indulging in drunkenness is a form of self-destruction. While it may provide a fleeting escape from lifeβs hardships, this temporary state ultimately robs individuals of their clarity, agency, and connection to reality, likening it to a minor death or 'temporary suicide'.
In practice
During a speech about the dangers of addiction at a community center, one might quote Russell to emphasize the seriousness of alcohol abuse.
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.
As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.
How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism.
Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn't believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.
Your descendants shall gather your fruits.
Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.
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