Selected opinion quotes

1. A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

2. I like who I am, and am puzzled to find that not everybody shares this opinion.

3. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

4. I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them.

5. Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

6. We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.

7. Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.

8. Baseball is a game played by idiots for morons.

9. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

10. I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there.

11. I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.

12. Busy opinion is an idle fool.

13. In economics, the majority is always wrong.

14. Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

15. He who loves is not ashamed before men of what he does for God, neither does he hide it through shame though the whole world should condemn it.

16. I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage.

17. To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

18. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.

19. I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.

20. Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

21. We shall always keep a spare corner in our heads to give passing hospitality to our friends' opinion.

22. Many share my views with me. But I don't share them with them.

23. My position has always been that there's two types of people opposed to pornography: those who don't know what they're talking about, and those who don't know what they're missing.

24. Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

25. My great comfort is, that the temporary celebrity I have wrung from the world has been in the very teeth of all opinions and prejudices. I have flattered no ruling powers; I have never concealed a single thought that tempted me.

26. He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person.

27. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

28. In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

29. I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

30. It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion.

31. The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies.

32. Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

33. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

34. Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs.

35. In the Islamic government all people have complete freedom to have any kind of opinion.

36. Wind buffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.

37. I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

38. There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition.

39. A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

40. Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate, in adhering to an opinion once adopted.

41. I think it would be a good idea!

42. The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Da-sein lets itself be affected by the world. The they prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one 'sees.'

43. A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

44. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

45. 'I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it'.

46. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

47. That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

48. Nothing was or is farther from my intentions, than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion, where I have only expressed doubt.

49. What all agree upon is probably right; what no two agree in most probably is wrong.

50. Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience ... that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

51. My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.

52. The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration. Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.

53. It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.

54. Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.... It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

55. He who has an opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others, is a slave.

56. I care what 51 percent of the people think of me.

57. I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

58. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another. (p. 10)

59. The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. (p. 24)

60. We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. (p. 24)

61. Ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present. (p. 25)

62. There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right. (pp. 26-27)

63. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. (pp. 27-28)

64. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it. (p. 37)

65. Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next - and on and on.

66. I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

67. I know it as much as anyone knows anything. Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.

68. The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous - licentious - abominable - infernal - Not that I ever read them-no-I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

69. It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews....

70. There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless - too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.

71. (August 2004): Awards that ignore me are losers.

72. You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

73. I set out as a sort of self-dependent politician. My opinions were my own. I dashed at all prejudices. I scorned to follow anybody in matter of opinion.... All were, therefore, offended at my presumption, as they deemed it.

74. Opinion is a light, vain, crude, and imperfect thing;

75. Briefly, then, we dismiss the two opposite dangers of bigotry and fanaticism, bigotry which is a too great vagueness and fanaticism which is a too great concentration. We say that the cure for the bigot is belief; we say that the cure for the idealist is ideas. To know the best theories of existence and to choose the best from them (that is, to the best of our own strong conviction) appears to us the proper way to be neither bigot nor fanatic, but something more firm than a bigot and more terrible than a fanatic, a man with a definite opinion. But that definite opinion must in this view begin with the basic matters of human thought, and these must not be dismissed as irrelevant, as religion, for instance, is too often in our days dismissed as irrelevant. Even if we think religion insoluble, we cannot think it irrelevant. Even if we ourselves have no view of the ultimate verities, we must feel that wherever such a view exists in a man it must be more important than anything else in him.

76. Oh I see said the Earl but my own idear is that these things are as piffle before the wind.

77. The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase. (p. 20)

78. She was one of those people who say 'I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like.'

79. Elves are cool, man.

80. Anyone who hates children and dogs can't be all bad.

81. One test result is worth one thousand expert opinions.

82. The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle. The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead, even though it should conduct the pupil to opinions diametrically opposite to those of his teachers. We say this, not because we think opinions unimportant, but because of the immense importance which we attach to them; for in proportion to the degree of intellectual power and love of truth which we succeed in creating, is the certainty that (whatever may happen in any one particular instance) in the aggregate of instances true opinions will be the result; and intellectual power and practical love of truth are alike impossible where the reasoner is shown his conclusions, and informed beforehand that he is expected to arrive at them.

83. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. (p. 9)

84. Of all the bete, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, that thing last night beat - as far as the acting and story went - and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless and scrannelpipiest - tongs and boniest - doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound - not excepting railway whistles - as I was by the cessation of the cobbler's bellowing.

85. We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment. A person who shows rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit - who cannot live within moderate means - who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgences - who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect - must expect to be lowered in the opinion of others, and to have a less share of their favourable sentiments; but of this he has no right to complain, unless he has merited their favour by special excellence in his social relations, and has thus established a title to their good offices, which is not affected by his demerits towards himself. (pp. 95-96)

86. That's as well said, as if I had said it myself.

87. Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

88. The minority is always in the right. The majority is always in the wrong.

89. The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.

90. Well, for those who like that sort of thing, I should think it is just about the sort of thing they would like.

91. If a meaningless person says something is meaningless, that's probably proof that it isn't meaningless; and if a boring person says something is boring, that's probably proof that it's interesting.

92. Well, Gosse, would you like to know what I think of Churton Collins? I think he's a Louse on the Locks of Literature.

93. Ozzy Osbourne has his bats, and I have that darn 'convert them to Christianity' quote. Some may not like what I said, but I'm still waiting to hear a better suggestion.

94. 'My position is neutral with respect to sheep' (2004)

95. Bruce, well I can basically say this. I have been around a lot of great martial arts fighters. Worked out with them. Fought them in tournaments. In my opinion Bruce Lee was the greatest martial artist who ever lived. To me thats my opinion. I think Bruce Lee is the greatest martial artist ever. I don't think anybody is in his class.

96. Opinions: 'Try not to let your prejudices stand in the way of learning. What seems one way to one person seems very different to another. What would be correct and good in one instance can be wrong under other circumstances. Therefore, I consider the opinions of others as I do the words from a friend's conversation; to be considered alongside my own and carefully weighed and thought about.'

97. Prudence: 'He who is silent must be agreed with, for what shall the wings of opposition thresh upon, without the winds of conversation to shoulder them.'

98. Perhaps because 'dry' comedy is so much more rare and odd than 'dry' wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

99. The greatest of superficial novelists... It were, in our opinion, an offense against humanity to place Mr Dickens among the greatest novelists.

100. I never give my work to somebody else and say, 'What do you think about that?' I just don't trust anybody. If I think it's funny, or if I think it's silly, I send it in anyway because I'm just trying to please myself. I never try to please a certain audience. I think that's disastrous. There's no way in the world you can anticipate what your reader is going to like or dislike.