Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
—Bertrand Russell
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
—Gore Vidal
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
—Robert Frost
However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.
—Robertson Davies
Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.
—Clarence Darrow
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
—Harper Lee
Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.
—Gerald W. Johnson
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
—G. K. Chesterton
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
—Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
I would never be popular. I didn't want to be; I liked being shy. I'd never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest.
—Laurie Halse Anderson in Wintergirls
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
—Mark Twain