dearer....................................

"In the modern world, if communities are unhappy, it is because the choose to be so.  Or, to speak more precisely, because they have ignorances, habits, beliefs, and passions, which are dearer to them than happiness or even life.  I find many men in our dangerous age who seem to be in love with misery and death, and who grow angry when hopes are suggested to them.  They think that hope is irrational and that, in sitting down to lazy despair, they are merely facing facts.  I cannot agree with these men.  To preserve hope in our world makes calls upon our intelligence and our energy.  In those who despair it is very frequently, the energy that is lacking."

-Bertrand Russell, excerpted from his essay Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday