How long halt ye between two opinions? I Kings 18:21
For many are deceived by their own vain opinion; and an evil suspicion hath overthrown their judgment. Sirach/Ecclesiasticus 3:24
We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets
Men are never so good or bad as their opinions. James Mackintosh, Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, 1830
Polling is bullshit. Penn & Teller, Bullshit s4e9: Numbers, PBS 2006
Gallup and Roper rejected Bernays’s view that human beings were at the mercy of unconscious forces, and so need to be controlled. Their system of opinion polling was based on the idea that people could be trusted to know what they wanted. They argued one could measure and predict the opinions and behaviour of the public if one asked strictly factual questions and avoided manipulating their emotions. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, BBC 2002
Prior to scientific polling the view of many people was that you couldn’t trust public opinion. It was irrational. That it was ill-informed, chaotic, unruly and so forth. And so that opinion should be dismissed. But with scientific polling, I think it established very clearly that people are rational, that they do make good decisions – and this offers democracy a chance to be truly informed by the public giving everybody a voice in the way the country is being run. George Gallup junior
I don’t know if I have a voice of my own. I don’t see me being an important person with something to say. I haven’t. I’ve got nothing to say. My opinion is of no consequence or value. Peter Ackroyd
What is merit? The opinion one man entertains of another. Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston
When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch. Bette Davis
People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others. Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval. F Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
You are young, my son, and as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters. Plato, Dialogues, Theatetus
One sort of inconstancy springs from levity or weakness of mind, and makes us accept everyone’s opinion, and another more excusable comes from a surfeit of matter. François de la Rochefoucauld
There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble. Anton Chekhov, The Portable Chekhov: The Mill
At my time of life opinions are tolerably fixed. It is not likely that I should now see or hear anything to change them. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we – and by implication all of life – were created by God within the last 10,000 years. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth p7
Never judge anyone by another’s opinions. We all have different sides that we show to different people. Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls
While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research — experiments, experience, and observation — research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process — or have gone through it and failed — are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate. Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent. Gore Vidal
At any given time, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice. Gore Vidal, Sex and the Law, 1965
If I’d wanted an opinion from an asshole, I’d have asked my own. Fargo s3e4: The Narrow Escape Problem, Ray impersonates Emmit, FX 2017
Deep thinking and learning is also taxing on our energy stores, and so we require simplification and reinforcement. Our minds, through repetition or emotion, learn things and then, having committed them to memory, rely on this information and often never question it again; we put our energy into other things we deem more important. Like building a structure with a strong base, we make our mental models the foundation for adding newer information. We notice things that match our view and we dismiss things that do not. As we build our narrow knowledge on top of that foundation, we might not even realize when the foundation itself is weak. And so, as we go on with our lives, filtering a massive amount of information, we can easily become blind to important information, caught in our own bubbles, disregarding some information or alternative views, even when it might be helpful to us. Our decisions are shaped by what we regard as the facts, and if new information emerges that belies what we believe, it often hardens us to our original view. Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
Many of us think that we are in total control of our thoughts, but we fail to understand that our thoughts are highly influenced by the people around us and everything we read, see, and do. Many of those same choices are because we want to belong. That influence on us, much of which we don’t realize, traps us in our own bubble of reality that may look very different than others’. ibid.
You get fifteen Democrats in a room, you get twenty opinions. Patrick Leahy
Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding ... I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men. Helen Keller