A Quote by Freeman Dyson

In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.

Freeman Dyson

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Happened History History Of Science Later Listen Majority Minority Often Out Refused Right Science The History Of Turned Wrong

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Freeman Dyson
American - Physicist
Born: December 15, 1923

Rules of Order state that ... No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organisation .... but No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become the majority.

Robert M. Pirsig

Was the majority right when they stood by while Jesus was crucified? Was the majority right when they refused to believe that the earth moved around the sun and let Galileo be driven to his knees like a dog? It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never right until it does right.

Henrik Ibsen

Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right, for the minority which is right will one day be the majority.

William Jennings Bryan

A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.

Henrik Ibsen

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

Henrik Ibsen

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

George Bernard Shaw

I would rather be in minority and be right, than in the majority and wrong.

Jodi Picoult

Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.

Llewellyn Rockwell

That the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of the history of the world.

John Adams

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

Freeman Dyson

Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

Philip Roth

Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe rather than practical applications for commercial gain. But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits.

Stephen Hawking

This leads to a question - if a great many people are for a certain project, is it necessarily right? If the vast majority is for it, is it even more certainly right? This, to be sure, is one of the tricky points of democracy. The minority often turns out to be right, and though one believes in the efficacy of the democratic process, one has also to recognize that the demand of the many for a particular project at a particular time may mean only disaster.

Frances Perkins

Trading has taught me not to take the conventional wisdom for granted. What money I made in trading is testimony to the fact that the majority is wrong a lot of the time. The vast majority is wrong even more of the time. I've learned that markets, which are often just mad crowds, are often irrational; when emotionally overwrought, they're almost always wrong.

Richard Dennis

When an unpopular minority is denied the right to marry, it is indeed the role of the courts to protect the rights of that minority, especially when a majority would deny them.

Margaret Hoover

And where else will [Hume,] this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in an individual of that minority?

Thomas Jefferson

A Quote by Freeman Dyson

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