Abba Eban Quotes

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.

Better be wrong with the many than right with the few.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

“Consensus” … is only another way of describing the issues that have been taken off the table.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform to other men's opinions than to bring them over to ours.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

You'll find individuals agreeing on this, but when they get into collective societies and larger groups they find it difficult to achieve group agreement.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.