An opinion is a conclusion or judgment, a belief. Opinions may or may not be based on facts and knowledge, but are based on experience and on limited factual knowledge, and are often flavored by emotion or group beliefs. Opinions are not certainty, though some who express opinions seem to think they are.
What are some opinions about opinions? Here are some samples!
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Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.
Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.
Why should we worry about what others think of us, do we have more confidence in their opinions than we do our own?
There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter how strong your opinions are. If you don’t use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. ‘But notwithstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.
The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
Be noble minded! Our own heart, and not other men’s opinions of us, forms our true honor.
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.
If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of douts of my own.
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Instead of telling our valuable stories, we seek safety in abstractions, speaking to each other about our opinions, ideas, and beliefs rather than about our lives. Academic culture blesses this practice by insisting that the more abstract our speech, the more likely we are to touch the universal truths that unite us. But what happens is exactly the reverse: as our discourse becomes more abstract, the less connected we feel. There is less sense of community among intellectuals than in the most ‘primitive’ society of storytellers.
The world is changed by your example not by your opinion.
Sort out what is opinion and what is fact; then you can see intelligently. The more clearly you can see, the more powerful your actions will be.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion . . . It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
I don’t give a damn for anybody’s opinion, I only care about the facts. So I’m not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.
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