Quotes About Opinion

How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work. —Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675

2 A fool takes no pleasure in trying to understand; he only wants to express his own opinion.

Praise never gives us much pleasure unless it concur with our own opinion, and extol us for those qualities in which we chiefly excel.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter.

Beauty] exists merely in the mind which contemplates [things]; and each mind perceives a different beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

Reasonable men may be allowed to differ where no one can reasonably be positive: Opposite sentiments, even without any decision, afford an agreeable amusement; and if the subject be curious and interesting, the book carries us, in a manner, into company, and unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life: study and society.

A very material question has been started concerning ABSTRACT or GENERAL ideas, WHETHER THEY BE GENERAL OR PARTICULAR IN THE MIND'S CONCEPTION OF THEM. A great philosopher [Dr. Berkeley.] has disputed the received opinion in this particular, and has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them.

Whence can any cause be known but from its known effects? Whence can any hypothesis be proved but from the apparent phenomena? To establish one hypothesis upon another is building entirely in the air; and the utmost we ever attain by these conjectures and fictions is to ascertain the bare possibility of our opinion, but never can we, upon such terms, establish its reality.

When any opinion leads us into absurdities, 'tis certainly false; but 'tis not certain an opinion is false, because 'tis of dangerous consequence.

There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence.

public opinion is undergoing a major evolution, due to the impressive German victories.

Pius XII "is good, fine, sensitive, it is even said oversensitive. But in my opinion, he lacks personality, or more exactly he lacks strong character.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

The greatest prison people live in is the fear of what other people think.

The greatest prison that people live in is the fear of what other people think.

There is to be no possibility whatever that anybody at all can even think that there is some institution or other in Germany that has a different opinion from the one expressed by the Führer.' Schacht

If you don't have your own opinion...than you have somebody else's.

Everyone who has never been to the South, and especially Northern journalists, are experts on that part of the country. Trained reporters who wouldn't dare venture an opinion on Iraq or Pakistan because they've never worked in those countries are happy to tell you about life in Dothan or Bainbridge, because, well, everybody knows what those people are like down there.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude," George Orwell argued in his essay "Why I Write,

But the world had gone mad, in his opinion. Lies and stupidity were more widespread than ever before. Demagogues and psychopaths dominated the political scene, and prejudice and intolerance were poisoning everything, sometimes even penetrating the discussions within his own, otherwise sensible team.

What's wrong with Barbara Kingsolver?" Eva asked. "She is the embodiment of liberal piety at its most middlebrow and tendentious. Her novels are the beef ribs of fiction.

Speciàl" is one of those elusive French words that means something (or someone is...peculiar. The use of it is one of the rare times that the French are noncommittal about their opinion.

Obama's position on marriage is brazenly cynical.

People have argued about God and government for centuries, and still they don't agree. But science, confronts opinion with facts.