Opinion
"Common Opinion" is what the English Social philosopher David Hume called it in his 1739 published work. Agreement and a sense of the common is what lay behind the English and French "opinion." In researching the term opinion, which is pronounced meinung in German, researchers were led back to Plato's Republic. In Plato's Republic, a quote from Socrates conclude that opinion takes the middle position. Kantt (1893,411)considered opinion to be an "insufficient judgement, subjectively as well as objectively." How valuable opinion may be was left out, however, the fact that it is suggested to be unified agreement of a population, or segment of the population, was still considered.
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Famous quotes containing the word opinion:
“Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“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.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)