Quotes About Opinion

I was an American citizen too; a citizen who had to watch his step, a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools. It was odd that such negative thoughts would invigorate me. But knowing the truth, no matter how bad it was, gave you some chance, a little bit of an edge.

That modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil

Thy resolution may fluctuate on the wild and changeful billows of human opinion, but mine is anchored on the Rock of Ages.

There is no better antidote against entertaining too high an opinion of others than having an excellent one of ourselves at the very same time.

Everybody knows there is a global culture—an ever-growing web of ideas held together by the majority of human beings. Yet nobody has much of an idea of what it is. No team of social scientists has yet gone forth to do the global opinion survey that would tell us (at least those of us who believe in opinion surveys) what knowledge and values the world's 5.2 billion people share in common.

It would be a great step toward a truly civil society if we understood that our public discourse isn't based on "hard facts," that all our wisdom is finite, and that nobody's opinion (not even yours or mine) is the final word.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.

But then it dawned on me that the opinion of someone who is always wrong has its own special utility to decision-makers.

I have met people who insist that humans taste like veal. And one woman from Canada who will swear up and down that people, like most other things, taste a bit like chicken. But she was crazy. And also Canadian.

Needing approval is tantamount to saying, Your view of me is more important than my own opinion of myself.

I can never be in charge of how other people are going to perceive me, because that's their opinion and they're entitled to it. Again, I can't control that. The only thing I can control is my character, which comes from my thoughts and the love I have inside, not my reputation and what other people think of me.

They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn't see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.

Much as the sage may affect to despise the opinion of the world, there are few who would not rather expose their lives a hundred times than be condemned to live on, in society, but not of it - a by-word of reproach to all who know their history, and a mark for scorn to point his finger at.

You can convince anyone of anything if you just push it at them 100% of the time. They may not believe it completely, but they will still use it to form opinions, especially if they have nothing else to draw on.

there's a big difference between being judgmental and making a judgment.

To notice a difference is to have an opinion about it—unless one refuses to think. And that is my ultimate objection to nonjudgmentalism. We can refuse to voice our judgments, but we cannot keep from having them unless we refuse to think about what is before our eyes.

Nor does one have the option of saying that differences exist but that one will not judge them. To notice a difference is to have an opinion about it—unless one refuses to think. And that is my ultimate objection to the nonjudgmental frame of mind. We can refuse to voice our opinions, our judgments, but we cannot keep from having them unless we refuse to think about what is before our eyes.

In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to the standards of that context, any scientific theory is turned into mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample.

Fact is what people believe.

You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.