Great Throughts Treasury

"The most tyrannical governments are those which make crimes of opinion, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts." -

"The more I consider the condition of the white men, the more fixed becomes my opinion that, instead of gaining, they have lost much by subjecting themselves to what they call the laws and regulations of civilized societies." - Tomochichi NULL

"Opinion only governs fools." - Samuel Tuke, fully Sir Samuel Tuke

"I agree with no man's opinion...The courage to believe in nothing." -

"Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." -

"Public opinion is stronger than the Legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments." - Charles Dudley Warner

"The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and of detail, is the one that must rule all observation." - John Weiss

"It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless." -

"All our distinctions are accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it is so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

"When people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one." -

"The most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts." - Edward Hallet "Ted" Carr

"All theories, all values, all reforms, all revolutions, all change, and all actions are built on the shifting sands of custom and opinion, and the winds of doubt and new circumstances and considerations are always blowing, always rising." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

"Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem – in my opinion – to characterize our age." - Albert Einstein

"The only sin which people never forgive in each other is difference of opinion." - Lydian Emerson, also Lidian Emerson, born Lydia Jackson

"Words can become idols, and machines can become idols; leaders, the state, power, and political groups may also serve. Science and the opinion of one’s neighbors can become idols, and God has become an idol for many." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"Be very careful never to show your own bias to anyone who is giving you information, or passing it on to you. Once he sees that you have a particular inclination he will instinctively tend to tell you what he thinks will suit you, and enhance your opinion of him." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell

"How a report is framed, which facts it contains and emphasizes and which it ignores, and in what context, are as important to sharing opinion as the bare facts themselves." - Mark Hertsgaard

"Nothing makes the multitude angrier than when someone forces them to change their opinion of him." - Herman Hesse

"In my opinion, better far it be to destroy vanity within my life than to destroy my life in vanity." - Juana Inés de la Cruz

"The truth of God has to run the gauntlet of all other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together." - William James

"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." - Thomas Jefferson

"Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." - Thomas Jefferson

"If thinking men would have the courage to think for themselves, and to speak what they think, it would be found they do not differ in religious opinion as much as is opposed." - Thomas Jefferson

"The greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinion than that they are in fashion." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"The mischief of flattery is not that it persuades any man that he is what he is not, but that it suppresses the influence of honest ambition, by raising an opinion that honor may be gained without the toil of merit." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Deep down, below the surface of the average man’s conscience, he hears a voice whispering. “There is something not right,” no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"Public opinion is founded to a great extent on a property basis. What lessens the value of the property is opposed, what enhances its value is favored." - Abraham Lincoln

"There is no other way of guarding one’s self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect. A prudent prince must therefore take a third course, by choosing for his council wise men, and giving these alone full liberty to speak the truth to him, but only of those things that he asks and of nothing else; but he must ask them about everything and hear their opinion, and afterwards deliberate by himself in his own way." - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

"[The press] is seldom intelligent, save in the arts of the mob-master. It is never courageously honest. Held harshly to a rigid correctness of opinion by the plutocracy that controls it with less and less attempt to disguise, and menaced on all sides by censorships that dare not flout, it sinks rapidly into formalism and feebleness. Its yellow section is perhaps its most respectable section for there the only vestige of the old free journalism survives." -

"The roots of reason are embedded in feelings – feelings that have formed and accumulated and developed over a lifetime of personality-shaping. These feelings are not a source of weakness but a resource of strength. They are not there for occasional using but are inescapable. To know what we think, we must know how we feel. It is feeling that shapes belief and forms opinion." - James E. Miller, Jr.

"Obstinacy and heat of opinion is the surest proof of stupidity. Is there anything so certain, resolute, disdainful, contemplative, grave, and serious as an ass." -

"What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated." -

"Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness; it sells the country to softness and vanity, and takes away from the state all its citizens, to make them slaves one to another, and one and all to public opinion." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the Press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences which are at its disposal. This unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer’s receptiveness for new truth." - Albert Schweitzer

"Nonconformity is an empty goal and rebellion against prevailing opinion merely because it is prevailing should no more be praised than acquiescence to it. Indeed, it is often a mask for cowardice, and few are more pathetic than those who flaunt outer differences to expiate their inner surrender." - William H. Whyte, Jr., fully William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte

"The teachings of economics say that anything in oversupply has no value; and one of the greatest things in oversupply has always been the simple opinion shared by others." - Nic Williams

"Men and women must be educated, in great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, until society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education." -

"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion." -

"Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts." -

"When I look at the stars and realize that the light from some of these suns takes a million years to reach my eyes, I realize how tiny and insignificant this earth is, and how microscopic and evanescent are my own little troubles. I will pass on soon; but the sea stretching for a thousand miles in all directions and the stars and the spiral nebulae swarming through illimitable space above, they will continue for millions of years. I marvel that any man looking up at the stars can have an exaggerated opinion of his own importance." -

"Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil." - Albert Einstein

"One of the things a wise man knows and a foolish man does not is that such things as social position, wealth, and the good opinion of the world, are too dearly bought at the cost of health or friendship or family ties." - Philippa Foot, fully Philippa Ruth Foot, née Bosanquet

"While irrational faith is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority says so, rational faith is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one's own productive observing and thinking in spite of the majority's opinion." -

"A prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support." - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

"An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide

"I have accustomed myself to receive with respect the opinion of others but always take the responsibility of deciding for myself." - Andrew Jackson

"Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself." - Anthony Trollope

"Confuse not love with the raptures of possession, which bring the cruelest of sufferings. For, not withstanding the general opinion, love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish. But desire is consequent of opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the starting-point." - Aristotle NULL