A Quote by Thomas Hobbes

From the same it proceedeth,that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler

Thomas Hobbes

Quote Topics

Approve Call Difference Different Different Names Gives Men More Names Only Opinion Own Passions Private Same Same Thing Than Thing

Quote Author

Thomas Hobbes
English - Philosopher
April 5, 1588 - December 4, 1679

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

Thomas Hobbes

Private opinion creates public opinion. Public opinion overflows eventually into national behavior as things are arranged at present, can make or mar the world. That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.

Jan Struther

Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.

Thomas Jefferson

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

Henry David Thoreau

I think, unfortunately, many opinion leaders in Germany - including government officials, politicians, social service bureaucrats and so forth - they are in the private system, and they get paid the private insurance by their employer. So for them this is the best of two worlds: They have some more expensive and privileged access, but they do not have to pay for it themselves. This is a system which is both inefficient and unfair at the same time, but it is defended by those who profit from this system, and this includes many opinion leaders and many politicians.

Karl Lauterbach

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have been called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

Thomas Jefferson

The scoreboard can't make you a loser. If you walk off the field with your head up, you don't lose. You don't hang your head for nobody. People in the stands think you're the greatest or the worst - their opinion doesn't make a difference. The only opinion that makes any difference is your own opinion of yourself.

Dan Marino

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

Henry Ward Beecher

Heresy is a word which, when it is used without passion, signifies a private opinion. So the different sects of the old philosophers, Academians, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, &c., were called heresies.

Thomas Hobbes

Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances.

Mark Twain

Nowadays public opinion is not the sum of private opinions. On the contrary, private opinions are an echo of public opinion

Nicolas Gomez Davila

The tiniest bits of opinion sown in the minds of children in private life afterwards issue forth to the world, and become its public opinion; for nations are gathered out of nurseries.