These Opinion quotes will inspire you. Opinion, a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging opinion quotes, opinion sayings, and opinion proverbs.
Inspirational Opinion Quotes
- “Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” ~ Jack Kerouac
- “A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion.” ~ Grantland Rice , Make your own opinion quotes
- “Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?” ~ William Lloyd Garrison
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“Public opinion in this country is everything.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “In every age, there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.” ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
- “Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step – it is an old business procedure.” ~ Fran Lebowitz
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“And it is long since I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
- “No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.” ~ Carrie Chapman Catt
- “It is impossible to stand upright when one plants his roots in the shifting sands of popular opinion and approval.” ~ Thomas S. Monson
- “The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.” ~ Christopher Lasch
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“There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.” ~ John Stuart Mill
- “There’s no right. There’s no wrong. There’s only popular opinion.” ~ Brad Pitt
- “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “I don’t hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by the tabloids or popular opinion. I don’t like bourgeois values. I say you find your own way to live.” ~ James Salter
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“It requires ages to destroy a popular opinion.” ~ Voltaire
- “It’s painful to listen to the barking of dogs.” ~ Nizar Qabbani
- “Public opinion should not be confused with popular sentiment. Popular sentiment is what people say to one another around their dinner tables. Popular opinion is what they say to callers from polling organizations.” ~ Richard Brookhiser , Difference of opinion quotes
- “Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.” ~ Swami Vivekananda
- “Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution was not – and is not – a grant of rights to the citizenry. Instead, the Constitution is a “barbed-wire entanglement” designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power.” ~ Jacob G. Hornberger
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“Turning popular opinion upside down does not make an original.” ~ Franz Grillparzer
- “Contrary to popular opinion, even totalitarian dictatorships are dependent on the population and the societies they rule.” ~ Gene Sharp
- “The fact — not theory — that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed.” ~ George Gaylord Simpson
- “Contrary to popular opinion, classical music does not have to be enjoyed amid exclusive circles, there need not be any snobbishness attached to it. It’s there for everyone. I play for the people.” ~ Andre Rieu
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“Contrary to popular opinion, things don’t go stale particularly fast in the art world.” ~ Jerry Saltz
- “Contrary to popular opinion, ‘Leave it to Beaver’ was not a documentary.” ~ Stephanie Coontz
- “Contrary to popular opinion, my dad was not a lazy man. He was not lazy at all, for instance, when it came to Going Places In His Truck. He was also very industrious about Preparing To Go Camping. And if something really interested him, he would work on it all day.” ~ Haven Kimmel
- “In America, educators punish those who actually think for themselves. There is only acceptance for popular opinion.” ~ Bryant H. McGill
- “Either one or the other [analysis or synthesis] may be direct or indirect. The direct procedure is when the point of departure is known-direct synthesis in the elements of geometry. By combining at random simple truths with each other, more complicated ones are deduced from them. This is the method of discovery, the special method of inventions, contrary to popular opinion.” ~ Andre-Marie Ampere
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“Sometimes you need a little courage too just to buck popular opinion.” ~ Herb Kelleher
- “Contrary to popular opinion, the most important characteristic of a godly mother is not her relationship with her children. It is her love for her husband. The love between husband and wife is the real key to a thriving family. A healthy home environment cannot be built exclusively on the parents’ love for their children. The properly situated family has marriage at the center; families shouldn’t revolve around the children.” ~ John F. MacArthur
- “Contrary to popular opinion, Christians are not nice polite people who never get angry with one another. Those are not the virtues of God’s people. Our virtues are truth-telling, kindness, forgiveness and yes, even anger-as long as it is the anger that is part of true love-through which we move closer to one another and to the God who has shown us how it is done.” ~ Barbara Brown Taylor
- “Despite popular opinion, there are no important parallels between Madonna and Monroe, who was a virtuoso comedienne but who was in secure, depressive, passive-aggressive, and infuriatingly obstructionist in her career habits. Madonna is manic, perfectionist, workaholic. Monroe abused alcohol and drugs, while Madonna shuns them. Monroe had a tentative, melting, dreamy solipsism; Madonna has Judy Holliday’s wisecracking smart mouth and Joan Crawford‘s steel will and bossy, circus master managerial competence.” ~ Camille Paglia
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“Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!” ~ Wendell Phillips
- “We’re in such a volatile climate right now politically. I think they didn’t want Assassins to not succeed due to popular opinion and politics, versus on its own merits. I can respect that.” ~ Neil Patrick Harris
- “Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people’s linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.” ~ S. I. Hayakawa
- “The intellectual’s hostility to the businessman presents no mystery, as the two have, by function, wholly different standards. While the businessman’s motto is the customer is always right, the intellectual’s task is to preserve his perceived standards against the weight of popular opinion.” ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel , Difference of opinion quotes
- “The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles o popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions” ~ Leo Strauss
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“The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.” ~ Thorstein Veblen
- “Everybody in Texas would tell me that they thought I was nuts trying to start Southwest Airlines. There probably weren’t 10 people in the state who would have given a plug nickel for our chances of making a dollar. So sometimes, you need a little courage, too, just to buck popular opinion.” ~ Herb Kelleher
- “Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education.” ~ Mary Wollstonecraft
- “Of all the ingenious mistakes into which erring man has fallen, perhaps none have been so pernicious in their consequences, or have brought so many evils into the world, as the popular opinion that the way of the transgressor is pleasant and easy.” ~ Hosea Ballou
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“In sum, the purpose is to contest the popular view, because popular opinions are so frequently found to be untimely, misled (by propaganda), or plainly wrong.” ~ Humphrey B. Neill
- “What is true has never been a question to be decided by polls or popular opinion. Truth isn’t ‘democratic’—it’s something that God has written into the very fabric of nature.” ~ Charles Colson
- “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “Evolutionism is a religious world view that is not supported by science, Scripture, popular opinion, or common sense. The exclusive teaching of this dangerous, mind-altering philosophy in tax-supported schools, parks, museums, etc. is a clear violation of the First Amendment.” ~ Kent Hovind
- “The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.” ~ Georg Brandes
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“Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called “public” or “popular” opinion.” ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset
- “In Iraq #1 we stayed within U.N. mandates, limited our response, went home after Kuwait was freed – and were censured for allowing Shiites and Kurds to be butchered and not going to Baghdad when the road was open and the dictator tottering. In Iraq #2 we removed the tyrant at less cost than the liberation of Kuwait during the earlier war, stayed on to ensure freedom and fair representation for various groups – and are being castigated for either using too little force to ensure needed order or too much power that stifles indigenous aspirations and turns popular opinion against us.” ~ Victor Davis Hanson
- “The sand in the hourglass runs from one compartment to the other, marking the passage of moments with something constant and tangible. If you watch the flowing sand, you might see time itself riding the granules. Contrary to popular opinion, time is not an old white-haired man, but a laughing child. And time sings.” ~ Vera Nazarian
- “Make notes—I’ve lost more material than I’ve ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not still up there in one’s brain. It’s in outer space and it ain’t coming back.” ~ Judith Guest
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“We have all loved a guy we know has issues. Despite popular opinions, until we give it a final try, the relationship will always be in the ‘what if’ stage.” ~ Patti Stanger
- “Blessed, plainly, is that life which is not valued at the estimation of outsiders but is known, as judge of itself, by its own inner feelings. It needs no popular opinions as its reward in any way; nor has it any fear of punishments. Thus the less it strives for glory, the more it rises above it. For to those who seek for glory, that reward in the shape of present things is but a shadow of future ones, and is a hindrance to eternal life, as it is written in the Scriptures: ‘Truly I say to you, they have received their reward'” ~ Ambrose , Opinion quotes and judgement
- “Some of our problems can no more be solved correctly by majority opinion than can a problem in arithmetic and there are few problems that cannot be solved according to what is just and right without resort to popular opinion.” ~ Henry Latham Doherty
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“I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.” ~ Benjamin F. Wade
- “That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.” ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin
- “Their preservation depends upon a sentiment. As sentiment never yet annihilated a paying industry, we cannot hope to stay, wholly, the ax and saw of the lumberman. But popular opinion, combined with action, if directed intelligently towards the setting apart of someone section of the noble redwood forests… will, I believe, save for our present delight and for that of the generations who come after us, at least one grand forest of the Sequoia sempervirens such as the world cannot show elsewhere, such as a thousand years cannot reproduce.” ~ Frank Howard Clark
- “It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity – the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension – can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.” ~ Robertson Davies
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“Everyone has a right to their own opinion about me, and that’s fine. I’m just going to keep being myself and living my life. That’s all I can do.” ~ Dan Bilzerian
- “You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that’s what scientists believe. In fact many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist’s house on a sultry August day, you’ll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.” ~ Dave Barry
- “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan
- “[What Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, [is] that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.” ~ George Orwell
Summary: Opinion, a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty; a personal view, attitude, or appraisal.
