Frederick Scott Oliver Quotes

The masses, the public, is too strict.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics.

We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.

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.

According to the percentage people, you would be perfectly comfortable.

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

I've certainly had to bite my tongue on occasion and live to fight another day, so to speak, on certain things. But when you're new and fresh, you come out and think, 'I don't want to screw my chance up, so I'll go along with what everybody else does.'

Everybody thinks that I did this and I did that, but I just went along with the times.

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

In almost any country, probably in Russia in particular, it's fashionable to criticise people in power. If you come out in support of someone like me, you're going to be accused of trying to ingratiate yourself.

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

We are half ruined by conformity, but we should be wholly ruined without it.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

We have been obliged to respond to the compulsions of our society.

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

Politicians are ready to suspend their beliefs or policy positions in the name of electoral success. When belief collides with public opinion, belief often goes.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

My mother's mantra was, 'How would it look to the neighbors?' And so you don't do anything because you're worried about how it would look to the neighbors.

Change has to come. It's not always what you'd like. It's what other people like.

We all have to wear social masks in our daily lives to get by.

Opinion has ever been stronger than law.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.