Quotes About Opinion

We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.

The mob asks to be overwhelmed by invective, by threats and revelations, by shattering pronouncements: the mob loves a shouter.

With sufficient perspective, nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.

I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word "truth"!

"Maternity," it has been said, "is a matter of fact, paternity is a matter of opinion."

Public opinion is the test of this polity; the best opinion which with its existing habits of deference, the nation will accept: if the free government goes by that opinion, it is a good government of its species; if it contravenes that opinion, it is a bad one.

The newspapers only repeat the side their purchasers like: the favourable arguments are set out, elaborated, illustrated; the adverse arguments maimed, misstated, confused.

The sort of taxation tried in America, that of taxing everything, and seeing what every thing would yield, could not have been tried under a Government delicately and quickly sensitive to public opinion.

Now that free government is in Europe so rare and in America so distant, the opinion, even the incomplete, erroneous, rapid opinion of the free English people is invaluable. It may be very wrong, but it is sure to be unique; and if it is right it is sure to contain matter of great magnitude, for it is only a first-class matter in distant things which a free people ever sees or learns.

Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong.

Marriage is better known than Barabbas; all the ideas which it calls up have been circulated in our books since the world began, and there is no useful opinion, no absurd scheme, but it finds an author, a printer, a library, and a reader.

I would rather fall short of the expectations of the boxes than fail in the eyes of the gallery, where reticence in the expression of critical opinion is not exactly a conspicuous virtue.

I should be the last woman to thumb my nose at the gentlemen whose judgments make or break a play in New York. They have treated me handsomely. But two or three of them write with a chisel.

Forced to vote for a Davis, I'll take Jefferson and give you Bette.

A visitor reading all the reviews the day after a New York opening would arrive at the conclusion that these men had not all seen the same play, so conflicting are their judgments.

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one

personality to match. He had an opinion about everything that went on in her house, from where she kept the tea bags to Billy's spelling tests to why she didn't buy out Aidan and run the bar herself. And to make matters worse, he had a better social life

You got judged one day at the very beginning, and that was it forever. Nothing you could do to change anyone's opinion.

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history.

disconnect between people's distaste for government and their attraction to its manifestations.

The problem with 'the crown jewel of Chinese literature' [Dream of the Red Chamber] is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.

It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision.