A Quote by Wendell Phillips
Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!
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Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Public opinion should not be confused with popular sentiment. Popular sentiment is what people say to one another around their dinner tables. Popular opinion is what they say to callers from polling organizations.
Carlyle said 'a lie cannot live.' It shows that he did not know how to tell them.
Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.
Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faithas well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!).... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.
That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.
IT is reported of Margaret Fuller that she said she accepted the universe. "Gad, she'd better!" retorted Carlyle. Carlyle himself did not accept the universe in a very whole-hearted manner. Looking up at the midnight stars, he exclaimed: "A sad spectacle! If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!"
I don't care very much for literary shrines and hauntsI knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle's yard. And when I said, "Why throw a stone into Carlyle's yard?" she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.
Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called "public" or "popular" opinion.
Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.
It is not to everyone's taste that truth should be pronounced pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is pronounced unpleasant.
Some Critics on the Hearth are not only good-natured, but have rather too high, or, if that is impossible, let us say too pronounced, an opinion of the abilities of their literary friends.
I'm a student of Ice Cube and Scarface, which means the stuff I rap about is not radio-friendly, and it's very opinionated. and it's very much from the perspective of a black man in America, and our opinion ain't always popular when we have a political opinion.
Some of our problems can no more be solved correctly by majority opinion than can a problem in arithmetic and there are few problems that cannot be solved according to what is just and right without resort to popular opinion.
Platypus? I thought it was pronounced platymapus. Has it always been pronounced platypus?
No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.
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