Herbert Spencer Quotes

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

In America, public opinion is the leader.

Opinion has ever been stronger than law.

Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.

The world is governed by opinion.

Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

When your opinions start to coincide with those of the majority, it is time to reconsider your opinions.

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

I like debating policy.

We're living in an age of the think piece.

When the multitude detests a man, inquiry is necessary; when the multitude likes a man, inquiry is equally necessary.

If by the people you understand the multitude, the hoi polloi, 'tis no matter what they think; they are sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong; their judgment is a mere lottery.

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.

Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?

It may be that 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' in fifty one cases out of a hundred, but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, of, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.

Opinion, whether well or ill-founded, is the governing principle of human affairs

One poll showed that Americans have a higher opinion of witches, the IRS and hemorrhoids than Congress

Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Bad reviews I've gotten never diminished the number of people in my audience; good reviews have never added to the number of people in my audience; be your own critic.

I'd like to be clear that a number of people find me intolerable, and they don't hesitate to say so - which they and I cherish.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.