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People will in a great degree, and not without reason, form their opinion of you by that they have of your friends, as, says the
-Proverb
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Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.
-Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) Acton
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Public opinion is a second conscience.
-William R. Alger
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Opinion is the main thing which does harm or good in the world. It is our false opinions that ruin us.
-Marcus Antonius
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Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods
-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, ch. 6 (1963)
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How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.
-Jane Austen
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Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.
-Walter Bagehot
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Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
-Bernard Baruch
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I don't have time to be classified as difficult, and I don't have time to care.
-Kim Basinger
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Opinions that are well rooted should grow and change like a healthy tree.
-Irving Batcheller
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Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.
-Walter Benjamin
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Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
-Walter Benjamin
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The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
-William Blake
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Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.
-Phillips Brooks
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Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.
-Les Brown
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Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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To try and change opinion by law is worse than futile.
-George Earle Buckle
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A public opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
-Warren Buffett
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The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
-Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
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Opinions have vested interests just as men have.
-Samuel Butler
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The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.
-Samuel Butler
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Opinions are made to be changed --or how is truth to be got at?
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?
-Thomas Carlyle
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There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.
-John Jay Chapman
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There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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No liberal man would impute a charge of unsteadiness to another for having changed his opinion.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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What you think of me is none of my business.
-Terry Cole-Whittaker
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Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones, and ultimately flow down to the people as rain unto the sea.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally allowable emotion, it may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman.
-Aleister Crowley
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Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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What we call public opinion is generally public sentiment.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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A lot of my peer group think I'm an eccentric bisexual, like I may even have an ammonia-filled tentacle somewhere on my body. That's okay.
-Robert Downey Jr.
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It is always brave to say what everyone thinks.
-Georges Duhamel
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Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.
-Wayne Dyer
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He that never changes his opinion never corrects mistakes and will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today.
-Tryon Edwards
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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 even incapable of forming such opinions.
-Albert Einstein
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The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed.
-Albert Einstein
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Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays:
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Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.
-Epictetus
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Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information.
-John Erskine
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I sometimes think
His critical judgement is so exquisite
It leaves us nothing to admire except his opinion.
-Christopher Fry, The Dark is Light Enough, 1954
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No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have; and I think he's a dirty little beast.
-W. S. Gilbert
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No two men see the world exactly alike, and different temperaments will apply in different ways a principle that they both acknowledge. The same man will, indeed, often see and judge the same things differently on different occasions: early convictions must give way to more mature ones. Nevertheless, may not the opinions that a man holds and expresses withstand all trials, if he only remains true to himself and others?
-Johann von Goethe
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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.
-Paul Goodman
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When anyone tells me I can't do anything... I'm just not listening any more.
-Florence Griffith-Joyner
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Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.
-Edward F. Halifax
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Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
-William Hazlitt
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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.
-G. W. F. Hegel
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Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.
-Hippocrates
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People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.
-Grace Murray Hopper
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American public opinion is like an ocean -- it cannot be stirred by a teaspoon.
-Hubert Humphrey
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There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.
-W. R. [William Ralph] Inge, Outspoken Essays 1910, Our Present Discontents
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To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
-Thomas Jefferson
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Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
-Thomas Jefferson
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The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.
-Samuel Johnson
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Ah! Sir, a boy's being flogged is not so severe as a man's having the hiss of the world against him.
-Samuel Johnson
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The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing --to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party.
-John Keats
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A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
-John Maynard Keynes
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He who has an opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others, is a slave.
-Klopstock
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Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step -- it is an old business procedure.
-Fran Lebowitz
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I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up...
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Man is a gregarious animal and much more so in his mind than in his body. A golden rule; judge men not by their opinions but by what their opinions have made of them.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.
-Walter Lippmann
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The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.
-Walter Lippmann
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New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
-John Locke
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The foolish and the dead never change their opinions.
-James Russell Lowell
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Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion.
-Madonna
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False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.
-Joseph De Maistre
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Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
-Thomas Mann
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If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
-Marshall McLuhan
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There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity.
-Michel de Montaigne
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I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own; I would be rich of myself and not by borrowing.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, and spacious way.
-John Morley
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It's not that I don't have opinions, rather that I'm paid not to think aloud.
-Yitzhak Navon
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I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.
-Richard J. Needham
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Altered opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that. But perhaps for the right to have our opinions and to change them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
-Jos
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When I want your opinion I'll give it to you.
-Laurence J. Peter
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Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.
-Wendell Phillips
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The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, and the skillful direct it.
-Jeane Platiere
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Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
-Plato
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An obstinate person does not hold opinions; they hold them.
-Alexander Pope
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Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
-Ernest Renan
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We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.
-Fran
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We credit scarcely any persons with good sense except those who are of our opinion.
-Fran
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Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow is too lazy to form an opinion.
-Will Rogers
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A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.
-Will Rogers
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I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!
-Theodore Roosevelt
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It takes a very deep-rooted opinion to survive unexpressed.
-Jean Rostand
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It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
-Bertrand Russell
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Do not fear to be excentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
-Bertrand Russell
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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
-Bertrand Russell
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Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
-George Santayana
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To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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A man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away.
-Charles M. Schwab
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It is much easier to modify an opinion if one has not already persuasively declared it.
-David H. Souter
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A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.
-Germaine De Stael
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It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
-Jonathan Swift
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Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so.
-Tacitus
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Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.
-Booth Tarkington
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I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.
-Margaret Thatcher
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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.
-Henry David Thoreau
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I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.
-Ivan Turgenev
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Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.
-Mark Twain
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It is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
-Mark Twain
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It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.
-Mark Twain
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Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
-Mark Twain
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We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.
-Chuang Tzu
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My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure.
-Source Unknown
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In every fat book there is a thin book trying to get out.
-Source Unknown
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You're entitled to your own opinions. Your are not entitled to your own facts.
-Source Unknown
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The deadliest contagion is majority opinion.
-Source Unknown
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The average man's opinions are generally of more value to himself than to anyone else.
-Source Unknown
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If God thought about you as much as you think about Him, where would you be?
-Source Unknown
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Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
-Source Unknown
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Don't be swayed just because they say it's public opinion. Remember, public opinion is simple what everybody else thinks.
-Source Unknown
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A man is getting along on the road to wisdom when he begins to realize that his opinion is just an opinion.
-Source Unknown
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A great deal of laziness of mind is called liberty of opinion.
-Source Unknown
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A fellow can't keep people from having a bad opinion of him, but he can keep them from being right about it.
-Source Unknown
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In my opinion a mathematician need not preoccupy himself with philosophy -- An opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.
-Source Unknown
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Opinions are the cheapest commodities in the world.
-Source Unknown
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The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.
-Queen Victoria
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The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
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A mass of men equals a mass of opinions.
-Daniel Webster
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The more opinions you have, the less you see.
-Wim Wenders
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The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new attempt, differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, The Essays of E.B. White
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No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
-Oscar Wilde
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Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.
-Oscar Wilde
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But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books about Opinion
