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.
Interpretation
Believing without evidence can lead to prejudice and a closed mind.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell emphasizes the dangers of adhering to beliefs regardless of evidence supporting them. Such an attitude fosters hostility towards factual information that contradicts one's preconceived notions, ultimately resulting in a narrow-minded approach to understanding the world.
In practice
In a debate about climate change, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of being open to evidence.
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.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.
Six feet of dirt make all men equal.
The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.
I use both the 'I' and the 'we.' For on many, many matters, I am not simply expressing ideas that have happened to occur to Joseph Ratzinger, but I am speaking out of the common life of the Church's communion.
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