Quotes about opinions

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.

— Lord Acton

Public opinion is a second conscience.

— William R. Alger

Opinion is the main thing which does harm or good in the world. It is our false opinions that ruin us.

— Marcus Antonius

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 --moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former --but no opinion.

— Hannah Arendt

How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.

— Marcus Aurelius

Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

— Jane Austen

Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

— Bernard M. Baruch

I don't have time to be classified as difficult, and I don't have time to care.

— Kim Basinger

Opinions that are well rooted should grow and change like a healthy tree.

— Irving Batcheller

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

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

— William Blake

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

Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.

— Les Brown

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

To try and change opinion by law is worse than futile.

— George Earle Buckle

A public opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

— Warren Buffett

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

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

— Samuel Butler

Opinions are made to be changed --or how is truth to be got at?

— Lord Byron

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

— Thomas Carlyle

I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.

— John Jay Chapman

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

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

— Winston Churchill

No liberal man would impute a charge of unsteadiness to another for having changed his opinion.

— Marcus T. Cicero

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What you think of me is none of my business.

— Terry Cole-Whittaker

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

Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.

— Benjamin Disraeli

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.

It is always brave to say what everyone thinks.

— George Duhamel

Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

— Wayne Dyer

He that never changes his opinion never corrects mistakes and will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today.

— Tryon Edwards

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

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

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.

— Epictetus

Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information.

— John Erskine

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.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have; and I think he's a dirty little beast.

— W. S. Gilbert

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 Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

When anyone tells me I can't do anything... I'm just not listening any more.

— Florence Griffith-Joyner

Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.

— Edward F. Halifax

Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.

— William Hazlitt

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

People talk fundamentals and superlatives and then make some changes of detail.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.

— Admiral Grace Hopper

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

— Thomas H. Huxley

Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person.

— Dean William R. Inge

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

Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

— Thomas Jefferson

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

— Samuel Johnson

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

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

— John Maynard Keynes

He who has an opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others, is a slave.

— Klopstock

We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We credit scarcely any persons with good sense except those who are of our opinion.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step -- it is an old business procedure.

— Fran Lebowitz

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...

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

— John Locke

The foolish and the dead never change their opinions.

— James Russell Lowell

Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion.

— Madonna

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

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

— Thomas Mann

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

— Marshall Mcluhan

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

— John Stuart Mill

There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

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 Eyquem De Montaigne

Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, and spacious way.

— John Morley

It's not that I don't have opinions, rather that I'm paid not to think aloud.

— Yitzhak Navon

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

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

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

When I want your opinion I'll give it to you.

— Laurence J. Peter

Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

— Wendell Phillips

The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, and the skillful direct it.

— Jeane Platiere

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

— Plato

An obstinate person does not hold opinions; they hold them.

— Alexander Pope

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

— Spanish Proverb

Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.

— Ernest Renan

Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow is too lazy to form an opinion.

— Will Rogers

A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.

— Will Rogers

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

It takes a very deep-rooted opinion to survive unexpressed.

— Jean Rostand

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish your opinions.

— Zen Saying

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

A man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away.

— Charles M. Schwab

It is much easier to modify an opinion if one has not already persuasively declared it.

— David H. Souter

Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so.

— Publius Cornelius Tacitus

Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.

— Booth Tarkington

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.

— Margaret Thatcher

I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.

— Ivan Turgenev

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

It is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

— Mark Twain