Quotes About Opinion

My curiosity, alas, is not the kind that can be satisfied by objective knowledge. Plato said that opinion is worthless and that only knowledge counts, which is a neat formulation. ... But melancholy Danes from the northern mists understand that opinion is all there is. The great questions transcend fact, and discourse is a process of personality. Knowledge cannot respond to knowledge. And wisdom? Is it not opinion refined, opinion killed and resuscitated upward? Maybe Plato would have agreed with this.

Everyone should have their own opinion and be able to voice it. No matter what it is. Of course, that does not mean your opinion is always right. But, you're certainly entitled to your opinion.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

Who is so wise as to have a perfect knowledge of all things? Therefore trust not too much to thine own opinion, but be ready also to hear the opinion of others. Thought thine own opinion be good, yet if for the love of God thou foregoest it, and followest that of another, thou shalt the more profit thereby.

Because others cannot vibrate in your experience, they cannot affect the outcome of your experience. They can hold their opinions, but unless their opinion affects your opinion, their opinion matters not at all. A million people could be pushing against you, and it would not negatively affect you unless you push back. They are affecting what happens in their experience. They are affecting their point of attraction - but it does not affect you unless you push against them.

This is God's standards [against same-sex marriage and abortions]. And just because public opinion may have changed or somebody takes a poll - this is just one of the issues. And it doesn't matter what people say or what people think. It doesn't matter about the opinion polls. It's what God says, and God says this is a sin. And it's a sin against him, and he's going to judge sin.

I got a letter one day from somebody saying, `You're always criticizing the press. Why don't you talk about what Clay Felker is doing to your own paper [The Voice]?' And my 10-year-old son Tom, now with Williams & Connelly, put in a legal opinion, not - an opinion from the back of the car saying, `You know why? What are you, afraid?' So I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that Felker is destroying this paper.

I don't believe that expressing your opinion, regardless of who is there, is being rude. And it's a shame that we've reached a level in our country where we think that you don't have the right to put your opinion out there.

Publicity is a great purifier because it sets in action the forces of public opinion, and in this country public opinion controls the courses of the nation

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

The two chief things that give a man reputation in counsel, are the opinion of his honesty, and the opinion of his wisdom; the authority of those two will persuade.

One of the things that you learn, having been in this [President's] office for four years, is the old adage of Abraham Lincoln's. That with public opinion there's nothing you can't do and without public opinion there's very little you can get done.

It has always been my opinion since I first possessed such a thing as an opinion, that the man who knows only one subject is next tiresome to the man who knows no subject. Therefore, in the course of my life I have taught myself whatever I could, and although I am not an educated man, I am able, I am thankful to say, to have an intelligent interest in most things.

So many people took my opinion and some will give it more serious consideration because of who I am. Not because I have a specility in this field that I gave my opinion on, but simply because I am a little bit famous. I find that kind of power to presaude both frightening and exciting. My hope, my most frevent hope, is that I use this louder voice that success has given me, wisely. That I always remember that fame is the by product, not the substance of what I do.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

The stock market crashed in October 1929. But that was not the cause of what caused the Great Depression. It was, in my opinion, a very minor element of it. What happened was that from 1929 to 1933 you had a major contraction which, in my opinion, was caused primarily by the failure of the Federal Reserve System, to follow the course of action for which it was set up. It was set up to prevent exactly what happened from 1929 to 1933. But instead of preventing it, they facilitated it.

In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

As soon as an opinion becomes common it is sufficient reason for men to abandon it and to uphold the opposite opinion until that in its turn grows old, and they require to distinguish themselves by other things. Thus if they attain their goal in some art or science, we must expect them soon to cast it aside to acquire some fresh fame, and this is partly the reason why the most splendid ages degenerate so quickly, and, scarcely emerged from barbarism, plunge into it again.

In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.

People have tried to corner the market on being offended, corner the market on language and corner the market on opinion. Should I lose my job 'cause I offended somebody? No, of course not. Your life should never be affected by public opinion.

Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

My father has a high opinion of his opinion

About 90 percent of what's out there in cyberspace is hearsay - or lies - and opinion, often misinformed opinion, and it's all repeated over and over again.

Seducing one's neighbor to a good opinion and then afterwards believing devoutly in this neighbor's opinion--who can match women in this clever ploy?

My personal opinion...is that pocket watches will almost completely disappear and that wrist watches will replace them definitively! I am not mistaken in this opinion and you will see that I am right.

The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!

Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.

The opinion of the majority or the minority is of no importance! The important thing is the opinion of the Truth, of the Reason, of the Logic, of the High Intelligence!

Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points.

I don't want to create controversy; I just have an opinion on things, and there is nothing wrong with stating your opinion if you are asked. Everyone wants that right, and because you are famous doesn't mean you have less of a right.

The point in the report is that you shouldn't say to somebody just because they're Jewish, you must have an opinion on Israel. Any more than you say to anyone who is a Muslim you must have an opinion on any vile action that's been taken by misquoting the good name of Islam. I just ask people to be respectful and inclusive in their debate.

When I do form an opinion, I'm very aggressive about it. But I don't form that opinion until I've done a tremendous amount of work.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong. You cannot, by tying an opinion, to a man's tongue, make him the representative of that opinion; and at the close of any battle for principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the wounded, but among the missing.

For the record, someone will ALWAYS say that you are too big, too thin, too lean, too fat, too whatever. In my opinion, they are too conceited to think that their opinion is going to change our behavior. A person with confidence won't be deterred! Keep after it!

If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinion for or against.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

I'm not in favor of no government. You do need a government. But by doing so many things that the government has no business doing, it cannot do those things which it alone can do well. There's no other institution in my opinion that can provide us with protection of our life and liberty. However, the government performs that basic function poorly today, precisely because it is devoting too much of its efforts and spending too much of our income on things which are harmful. So I have no doubt that that's the major single problem we face.

I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.

I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

My opinion, young people go to the Internet. To the Internet distribution system right now, you put it up there and it's accessed by the world.

In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. If each person were given one quarter-acre, that is 1 1/4 acres to a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.

Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

There is nothing so depressing as a constant contemplation of one's self, and the greatest moral cowardice in the world's opinion comes from consulting one's own personal convenience.