Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
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.
I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity.
What is going on in the Un-American Activities Committee worries me primarily because little people have become frightened and we find ourselves living in the atmosphere of a police state, where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion.
We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.
There are a great many opinions in the world, and a good half of them are held by people who have never been in trouble![Много на этом свете взглядов, и добрая половина их принадлежит людям, не бывавшим в беде!]
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.[Il massimo inganno delli omini è nelle loro opinioni.]
Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.[Les opinions ont plus causé de maux sur ce petit globe que la peste ou les tremblements de terre.]
Opinions are made to be changed – or how is truth to be got at?
Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing – nothing. Only perhaps if it’s the book of a young person – or of a friend – no, even so, I think myself infallible.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
