John Ruskin Quotes

Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals.

Reason will conclude that where multitude is, there is the truth.

Was there ever a time when the majority was right?

When all are wrong, everyone is right.

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

The majority is always sane.

The world is governed by opinions.

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

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

If printers (publishers) only printed that which everyone liked, there would be very little printed

Singularity in the right hath ruined many; happy those who are convinced of the general opinion.

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

All becomes easy when we follow the current of opinion; it is the ruler of the world.

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

In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.

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

This leads to a question - if a great many people are for a certain project, is it necessarily right? If the vast majority is for it, is it even more certainly right? This, to be sure, is one of the tricky points of democracy. The minority often turns out to be right, and though one believes in the efficacy of the democratic process, one has also to recognize that the demand of the many for a particular project at a particular time may mean only disaster.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.

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.

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.

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.