The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

desirable that the social sense should be so
strongly developed as to cause such men to fear the
social hostility which their opinions may provoke.
What is desirable is to find ways of making this
hostility as slight and as ineffective as possible.
In the modern world the most important part of this
problem arises in youth. If a man is once launched
upon the right career and in the right surroundings,
he can in most cases escape social persecution, but
while he is young and his merits are still untested,
he is liable to be at the mercy of ignorant people
who consider themselves capable of judging in
matters about which they know nothing, and who
are outraged at the suggestion that so young a
person may know better than they do with all their
experience of the world. Many people who have
ultimately escaped from the tyranny of ignorance
have had so hard a fight and so long a time of
repression that in the end they are embittered and
their energy is impaired. There is a comfortable
doctrine that genius will always make its way, and
on the strength of this doctrine many people