I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.

- Edward Gibbon

The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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

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

You are not entitled to an opinion. An opinion is what you have when you don't have any facts. When you have the facts, you don't need an opinion.

- Solomon Short

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

- Carrie Chapman Catt

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

- Georg C. Lichtenberg

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.

- Walter Cronkite

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

- Mark Twain

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

- Thomas Mann

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

- Rosa Luxemburg

Knowledge has three degrees -- opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

- Plotinus

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

- Tryon Edwards

Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

- Mark Twain

If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of douts of my own.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



To value his own good opinion, a child has to feel that he is a worthwhile person. He has to have confidence in himself as an individual.

- Sidonie Gruenberg



Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.

- Carl Sandburg



Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. Journals, 1843

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

- Mark Twain



People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



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

- Thomas Jefferson



Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. 'But notwithstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.

- Eugene V. Debs



Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.

- Thomas Jefferson



In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Autobiography, 1959

- Mark Twain



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.

- Soren Kierkegaard



I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

- Thomas Jefferson



New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.

- George Bernard Shaw



There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion . . . It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



A great many people mistake opinions for thoughts.

- Herbert V. Prochnow



Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

letter to Connecticut Baptists

- Thomas Jefferson