opinion

"The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error. He resembles a child destitute of experience, full of ideal notions - a dangerous leaven mixes itself with all his knowledge - it is of necessity obscure, it is vacillating and false:

He takes the tone of his ideas on the authority of others,
who are themselves in error, or else have an interest in deceiving him.

Man seeks to range out of his sphere: notwithstanding the reiterated checks his ambitious folly experiences, he still attempts the impossible; strives to carry his researches beyond the visible world; and hunts out misery in imaginary regions. He would be a metaphysician before he has become a practical philosopher. He quits the contemplation of realities to meditate on chimeras. He neglects experience to feed on conjecture, to indulge in hypothesis. He dares not cultivate his reason, because from his earliest days he has been taught to consider it criminal.

The most important of our duties, then, is to seek means by which we may destroy delusions that can never do more than mislead us. The remedies for these evils must be sought for in Nature herself; it is only in the abundance of her resources, that we can rationally expect to find antidotes to the mischiefs brought upon us by an ill directed, overpowering blind enthusiasm."
- Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach

"To attain complete truth is not given to mortals, but to advance toward it by successive steps is not impossible. On any matter of general interest, there is usually, in any given community at any given time, a received opinion, which is accepted as a matter of course by all who give no special thought to the matter. Any questioning of the received opinion rouses hostility, for a number of reasons. The most important of these is the instinct of conventionality, which exists in all gregarious animals and often leads them to put to death any markedly peculiar member of the herd." - Bertrand Russell

"In the American media system, editorializing is theoretically positioned on the editorial pages, thus giving the reader the false sense of security that opinions and persuasion are not part of the regular news. Since the onslaught of twenty-four-hour cable news programs and increased competition for the public's attention both in print and broadcast, the American media system is embedding facts with opinions and placing editorial comments and news analyses on the front page." - Nancy Snow

"Always entertain opinions with some measure of doubt and do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." - Bertrand Russell

think tanks

"The lobbyists I met at Cassidy & Associates and APCO were more than eager to help out. In exchange for fees of up to $1.5 million a year they offered to send congressional delegations to Turkmenistan and write and plant opinion pieces in newspapers under the names of academics and think tank experts they would recruit." - Ken Silverstein