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.

I have looked at public opinion polls in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the height of Marshall Plan aid. They had a very negative attitude towards the United States then. There were negative attitudes towards the United States because of Vietnam. There were negative attitudes about the United States when Reagan wanted to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles. I don't think the president should base his foreign policy on American public opinion polls, let alone foreign public opinion polls.

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion - and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

Probably not a surprise that, among the people of Mexico, just 4 percent say that they have a positive opinion of [Donald] Trump. Seventy-five percent say they have a negative opinion.

I think, unfortunately, many opinion leaders in Germany - including government officials, politicians, social service bureaucrats and so forth - they are in the private system, and they get paid the private insurance by their employer. So for them this is the best of two worlds: They have some more expensive and privileged access, but they do not have to pay for it themselves. This is a system which is both inefficient and unfair at the same time, but it is defended by those who profit from this system, and this includes many opinion leaders and many politicians.

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.

American public opinion, as you can see in the polls, radically changed from being against airstrikes to being heavily in favor that [President Obama] decided to do airstrikes. This is a classic example of leading from behind where he waits for public opinion. And now it's the public who's demanding he do something.

Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits . . . it is founded on morals and religion, whose authority reigns in the heart, and on the influence all these produce on public opinion before that opinion governs rulers.

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!

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

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

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.

Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not cannot be objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.

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

I have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they're disruption efforts. The working theory behind the intelligence report on Russian interference in the president election is that Russia influenced American public opinion. We may not like that, but if it influenced American public opinion, at least in the guise of legitimate activity - which is what the report says - then there's nothing you can do about that. Where it would be improper and illegal would be if there was actual collusion in those efforts. We don't know that.

The fundamental problem is that the gap in educational achievement, which is a key in our technological economy, is due in my opinion - and the opinion of many, including Arne Duncan, our secretary of education - to the fact that the families of the poor who are not very educated are not talking to their children, interacting with their children, insisting they do their homework and so on.

You have to listen to the people who have a negative opinion as well as those who have positive opinion. Just to make sure that you are blending all these opinions in your mind before a decision is made.

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.

In terms of the rise of social media and the kind of discourse that it encourages, the kind of pointed attitude it encourages, in terms of the number of venues like our conversation here where reporters who are not technically opinion columnists are giving analysis that's invariably gonna edge into opinion. I think our journalism is getting much more almost European in terms of that, that ideal of objectivity exiting it.

The only thing that matters in life is your own opinion about yourself, nobody can destroy your dignity then, because it is not dependent on anybody's opinion.

But there was no room at the inn"; the inn is the gathering place of public opinion; so often public opinion locks its doors to the King.

It rarely adds anything to say, "In my opinion" - not even modesty. Naturally a sentence is only your opinion; and you are not the Pope.

I don't watch the nightly newscasts on TV . . . nor do I watch the endless hours of people giving their opinion about things. I don't read the editorial pages; I don't read the columnists. It can be a frustrating experience to pay attention to somebody's false opinion.

He who has no opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others, is a slave.

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.

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 don't care if people I admire criticize me because their opinion is valuable to me.

My opinion has always been this, that you ought to never give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breath your own, or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan. Yes, lass, last night I ate stolen bread and left my son among men who are going to use pick-handles on the authorities, so I thought I might just as well look you up this morning.

I think I got a complete picture of what the lives of scientists are like. My father is of the opinion that if scientists are allowed to follow their nose, eventually it results in something. Unfortunately that doesn't always happen. What I came out of it with, in a non-cynical way, was that the scientific process is as messy as anything else. There's nothing wrong with that. That's just the way it is.

To have two Legislative Assemblies in the United Kingdom would, in my opinion, be an intolerable mischief; and I think no sensible man can wish for two within the limits of the present United Kingdom who does not wish the United Kingdom to become two or more nations, entirely separate from each other.

In my opinion, if the human race is going to survive, [religion] is something we definitely need to get over - and we're far from over it, and so therefore, I'm far from over it.

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.

In sixth grade, we all had to write this opinion paper. Most wrote about things like why we should be able to chew gum in class - I wrote about why women should receive equal pay.

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.

No well-informed person has declared a change of opinion to be inconstancy.

The man who cannot listen to an argument which opposes his views either has a weak position or is a weak defender of it. No opinion that cannot stand discussion or criticism is worth holding. And it has been wisely said that the man who knows only half of any question is worse off than the man who knows nothing of it. He is not only one-sided but his partisanship soon turns him into an intolerant and a fanatic. In general it is true that nothing which cannot stand up under discussion or criticism is worth defending.

You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.

In my opinion we are at the limit now, and 17 races is really too much. With all the testing that we do now, it means we're always on the bike and it's quite difficult.

You don't believe in God, Rachel. You don't believe in goodness or love or mercy, do you?" "I haven't seen enough to form an opinion." "But you believe in the devil?" "When I'm sitting in a car with him, yes," she said.

Satyagraha is a process of educating public opinion, such that it covers all the elements of the society and in the end makes itself irresistible.

Russia has got to be the team to beat, in my opinion. When they are playing together as a team, they are tough to beat.

I believe that the position of the friends of peace is strengthening. The friends of peace are able to work in the open. They base themselves upon the force of public opinion. They have at their disposal such instruments as, for instance, the League of Nations. This is to the advantage of the friends of peace.

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.

As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it's our own opinion.

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.