Many, if not most, good ideas die young — mainly from neglect on the part of the parents, but sometimes from over-fondness. Once well started, an opinion had better be left to shift for itself.
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The Art of Propagating Opinion.Samuel(novelistButler
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I do not believe that the tendency is to make men and women brave and glorious when you tell them that there are certain ideas upon certain subjects that they must never express; that they must go through life with a pretence as a shield; that their neighbors will think much more of them if they will only keep still; and that above all is a God who despises one who honestly expresses what he believes. For my part, I believe men will be nearer honest in business, in politics, grander in art — in everything that is good and grand and beautiful, if they are taught from the cradle to the coffin to tell their honest opinion.
Robert G. Ingersoll
I will add that I have recently received from Hungary a little paper on non-Euclidean geometry in which I rediscover all my own ideas and results worked out with great elegance... The writer is a very young Austrian officer, the son of one of my early friends, with whom I often discussed the subject in 1798, although my ideas were at that time far removed from the development and maturity which they have received through the original reflections of this young man. I consider the young geometer J. Bolyai a genius of the first rank.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Burgess had been a schoolteacher (like William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies) and evidently sensed a stirring of revolt among the youth of his country and elsewhere in the West, a revolt with which—as a deeply unconventional man who felt himself to be an outsider however wealthy or famous he became, and who drank deep at the well of resentment as well as of spirituous liquors—he felt some sympathy and might even have helped in a small way to foment. And yet, as a man who was also deeply steeped in literary culture and tradition, he understood the importance of the shift of cultural authority from the old to the young and was very far from sanguine about its effects. He thought that the shift would lead to a hell on earth and the destruction of all that he valued....Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant.
Anthony Burgess
I have great fondness and affection for John McCain, I would have voted for him, if he had made it, against Gore, quite frankly, in 2000. The guy that I see now, putting air quotes around women's health, and doing all the things that he does, I don't know what that is. And if that's a strategy that's disingenuous from how he really thinks, then my opinion of him is even lower.
Jon Stewart
It is a sin of the soul to force young people into opinions ... but it is culpable neglect not to impel young people into experiences.
Kurt Hahn
Butler, Samuel (novelist, 1835-1902)
Butler, Samuel (poet
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