>W B Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." I always read this quote by Yeats as a lamentation about the stat

>W B Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." I always read this quote by Yeats as a lamentation about the status of the world, similar to your Russel quote that's a bit more explicit. But the Socrates quote is clearly not in this vein... It never occurred to me before that Yeats might be more in line with Socrates than with Russell. You can read him as praising the best for their lack of conviction and condemning the worst for their passion. I like that reading much better. (Of course, I've never read the source, just heard it quoted.)