Henrik Ibsen Quotes

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

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Democrats are so spineless, so afraid to go against the tide... but dissension is the greatest form of patriotism.

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle - among others - that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

When a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

I am a contrarian.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Unanimity of opinion is characteristic of savages and civilization only advances as more and more people have the right to call wrong what the majority calls right..

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

The majority never has right on its side.

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

There are people who consider it almost unpatriotic to be inquisitive and to be truthful about your opinions.

To be a contrarian, you've got to be a contrarian against your own people.

It is not undemocratic to express one's difference of opinion.

We forget that there is much more patriotism in having the audacity to differ from the majority than in running before the crowd; we forget that in the resistance of the minority some of the biggest things in our own history have been accomplished, and the man who looks on the Stars and Stripes and doesn't hold a right to say nay to his neighbor, even if the neighbor is of the larger party, has forgotten the history of his country.