Richard Cecil Quotes

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Unless you are unique, your opinion goes out the window.

Is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.

The committee will be composed of open-minded people who agree with me.

The world is governed by opinions.

If you're going to be ridiculous, be over-the-top ridiculous.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.

A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.

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

Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices.

There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.

We are one of the most tolerant societies in the world, and in order to stay tolerant, my party believes that we should stop being tolerant to the people who are intolerant to us.

In politics nothing is so absurd as rancor.

Most of our fellow-subjects are guided either by the prejudice of education or by a deference to the judgment of those who perhaps in their own hearts disapprove the opinions which they industriously spread among the multitude.

If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.

Howbeit, this one thing, son, I assure you on my faith, that if the parties will at hands call for justice, then, all were it my father stood on the one side, and the devil on the other, his cause being good, the devil should have right.

Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Nazi Party!

I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.

As many opinions as there are men; each a law to himself.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.