A Quote by Peter Abrahams

There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.

Peter Abrahams

Quote Topics

Aware Because Being Between Count Difference Majority Minority Numbers Only Pressure Psychological Qualitative Stronger

Quote Author

Peter Abrahams
South African - Novelist
March 3, 1919 - January 18, 2017

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion - and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

Soren Kierkegaard

Majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things - proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. Majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. People have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.

Howard Zinn

The pressure of being a goalkeeper is one of those things that attracts a lot of people to the position, if you don't have that, if you don't enjoy that pressure, I don't think you're suited to playing goalkeeper. It's about being strong mentally, being able to see the difference between making honest mistake and silly mistakes.

Kasper Schmeichel

The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.

Soren Kierkegaard

It is not just that we exist and God has always existed, it is also that God necessarily exists in an infinitely better, stronger, more excellent way. The difference between God's being and ours is more than the difference between the sun and a candle, more than the difference between the ocean and a raindrop... God's being is qualitatively different.

Wayne Grudem

[N]o one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.

L. Neil Smith

Donald Trump won, or he got the majority of the electoral votes, a large majority. I think it would be patronizing to say that the majorities of people in Florida and Ohio, smaller majorities in Wisconsin and Michigan, that they voted for him because they were misled by something on Facebook.

Brad Stone

Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.

Harold Rosenberg

There is a difference between being offended and being prejudiced and even being bigoted against. There's a difference between that and racism.

Justin Simien

A part of being black in America and, you know, I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that we're being too aware of race somehow, we're obsessed with it or we're seeing racism where there just isn't racism.

Jordan Peele

I'm not a minority: I'm a majority of one. We all are. To call someone a minority, you give them baggage, of not being full, or not being seen as full. All of us need to be seen as full human beings.

Jose Antonio Vargas

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Ayn Rand

The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused.... We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Growing numbers of corporate executives are aware of the inextricable link between the well being of our families and the well-being of our nation. Nowhere is this link manifest so strongly as with the problem of hunger.

Arnold Hiatt

Consciousness is not the ineluctable starting point for self-understanding because there is a difference between being conscious and understanding oneself as a conscious being. The difference is between being in a certain state and knowing oneself to be in a certain state.