Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
—Bertrand Russell
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
—Virginia Woolf
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
Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions.
—Cullen Hightower
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
—Oscar Wilde
Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day… we become seekers.
—Peter Matthiessen
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
—Bertrand Russell
There are as many opinions as there are experts.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
—Edith Sitwell
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
—Edmond de Goncourt
You get fifteen Democrats in a room, and you get twenty opinions.
—Patrick Leahy
Opinions are made to be changed—or how is truth to be got at?
—Lord Byron
In a quarrel, each side is right.
—Yiddish folk saying
I put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!
—John Stuart Mill
When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are to be called, will be the same.
—Alexander Hamilton