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People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.
--
Französische Bühne (The French Stage), ch. 9 (1837)

 

Heinrich Heine

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Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.

 

John Stuart Mill

 

I for one would never be a party, unless the law were clear, to saying to any man who put forward his views on those most sacred things, that he should be branded as apparently criminal because he differed from the majority of mankind in his religious views or convictions on the subject of religion. If that were so, we should get into ages and times which, thank God, we do not live in, when people were put to death for opinions and beliefs which now almost all of us believe to be true.

 

John Coleridge

 

Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning; and the opinions so formed by one generation become the conscientious convictions or the sacred instincts of the next.

 

Robert Cecil

 

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions

 

Leo Strauss

 

You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world.

 

(Thomas) Woodrow Wilson