Quotes About Opinion

Private opinion creates public opinion. Public opinion overflows eventually into national behavior as things are arranged at present, can make or mar the world. That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.

If you want to get power, listen carefully. Don't be impulsive. Don't arrogantly insert your opinion. Express gratitude. Cultivate a culture of respect. Show your respect for other people's efforts. Promote a culture of equality, too, where everybody's opinion matters. Tell stories.

You don't want someone who can't tell the difference between having a different opinion and dismissing your opinion.

I spent so many years just saying what I felt without thinking about the ramifications, without understanding that I have this opinion but not everyone might share that opinion and now they don't like me because of it.

Think you have a low opinion of government? You should see government's opinion of you!

A French observer is surprised to hear how often an English or an American lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; ... This abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the English and American lawyer, this servitude of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more conservative inclinations in England and America than in France.

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.

There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women. These should therefore be our chief study; we should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal, without knowing that they do so; for they will only be indulging their own desire of personal admiration.

Opinion is not knowledge. You're entitled to your own opinion but you're not entitled to your own facts.

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

I don't feel ignored. But I'd rather engage readers than dictate my opinion to them. Opinion is so...subjective!

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.

It is in the middle classes of society that all the finest feeling, and the most amiable propensities of our nature do principally nourish and abound. For the good opinion of our fellow-men is the strongest though not the purest motive to virtue. The privations of poverty render us too cold and callous, and the privileges of property too arrogant and confidential, to feel; the first places us beneath the influence of opinion--the second, above it.

When I look at public opinion, I'm not far out of the mainstream. I'm in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I've ever said.

Whether we're talking about what the role of the government is, what you think of the United Nations, political leaders or how to respond to [Hurricane] Katrina and whether it had anything to do with race, across a wide variety of issues we see differences between mainstream black and white American opinion that dwarfs anything in American public opinion, period. Democrat versus Republican, men versus women, conservative versus liberal, the black/white divide is the biggest, one of the biggest in the world, and certainly the largest gap in the United States.

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.

You can tell how much someone respects you by how much he respects your opinion. If he doesn't respect your opinion, he won't respect you.

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great.

If you don't like me, you don't like me. You can call me anytime; I'll have an opinion on just about anything. I will also tell you if I shouldn't have an opinion on something - I just make television shows.

On Sept 15th [1852] Mr Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked my opinion on the utility of Mr Babbage's calculating machine, and the propriety of spending further sums of money on it. I replied, entering fully into the matter, and giving my opinion that it was worthless.

You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not secretary of state; I am. If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.

Since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinion that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

The tumults in America I expected would have produced in Europe an unfavorable opinion of our political state. But it has not. On the contrary, the small effect of these tumults seems to have given more confidence in the firmness of our governments. The interposition of the people themselves on the side of government has had a great effect on the opinion here in Europe.

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

Public opinion is the last refuge of a politician without any opinion.

I have no opinion. No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he's still young and pretty.

When you start creating opinion, and you start creating difference of opinion, you're doing something. People are actually sitting down and critiquing. A lot of the stuff people hate, they really don't. They only look at the outer shell. They don't really get into it.

Everybody has their opinion and they are going to critique you.

I am certainly of opinion that genius can be acquired, or, in the alternative, that it is an almost universal possession.

During 'Chicago Hope,' I never let directors talk to me, because I was so spoiled. I started off with people like Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, James Lapine, unbelievably gifted people. So there I was saying, 'Don't talk to me, I don't want your opinion.' I behaved abominably.

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.

I accrued anger from people's low opinion of me and my work, and for the work I might be capable of.

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.

There has been this belief among the Catholic community - and this - I'm no expert, this is my opinion - that cafeteria Catholics are wrong.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

I really think it's important that my beliefs don't impinge upon what you get from the movie. It's your opinion that matters and it's far more interesting than mine.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

Years ago, it wasn't easy to communicate, and it wasn't easy to spread information. We were limited to the few media outlets that controlled viewership around the world and, by consequence, controlled the public opinion. But today, this platform is democratized. Any community around the world can help. That is the great thing about our time.

My opinion is that more languages you speak, better it is, but but when you come to America, you speak English.

If the Holocaust didn't take place, why then did this regime of occupation come about? Why do the European countries commit themselves to defending this regime? Permit me to make one more point. We are of the opinion that, if an historical occurrence conforms to the truth, this truth will be revealed all the more clearly if there is more research into it and more discussion about it.

I place flowers in the very first rank of simple pleasures; and I have no very good opinion of the hard worldly people who take no delight in them.

There was an op-ed piece in The New York Times by an evolutionary biologist or somebody - which was a curious place for the opinion to come from - and he said that there's no such thing as a completely free, uncensored medium, that people censor themselves all the time, in deference to hurting other people's feelings, or offending other groups, or in their own, not to provoke a fight. And you do self-censor certain things, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. That's just the way human social interaction works.

There is no reason to believe ... that the "essential purpose" of language is "communication". Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord privileged status to one or the other of these modes.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.

If I am mistaken in my opinion that the human soul is immortal, I willingly err; nor would I have this pleasant error extorted from me; and if, as some minute philosophers suppose, death should deprive me of my being, I need not fear the raillery of those pretended philosophers when they are no more.

It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.