"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand.”
“It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last.”
“My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I ever expect to see.”
More on Public Opinion
“Once you think about it, aren't the people who are living their lives without worrying about other people's opinions having more fun than those judging them?”
“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.”
“People who are not prepared to do unpopular things and defy the clamor of the multitude are not fit to be ministers in time of difficulty.”
More on Individualism
“We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to government founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.”
“Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men.”
“We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.”