Quotes & Sayings About Dissenting Opinions

Dissenting opinions are useful even when they're wrong. So instead of speaking to highly agreeable audiences, target suggestions to people with a history of originality. — Adam Grant

Minority viewpoints are important, not because they tend to prevail but because they stimulate divergent attention and thought, " finds Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth, one of the world's leading experts on group decisions. "As a result, even when they are wrong they contribute to the detection of novel solutions and decisions that, on balance, are qualitatively better".
Dissenting opinions are useful even when they're wrong. — Adam Grant

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as 'racist.' I would obviously scorn to deny such an allegation on my own behalf. I would, rather, prefer to repudiate it on behalf of my former friend. He had known me for many years and cooperated with me on numerous projects, and I am quite confident that he would never have as a collaborator anyone he suspected of racial prejudice. But it does remind me, and not for the first time, that quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency - not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them - to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one. — Christopher Hitchens

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions. — Peter Drucker

The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court ... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified. — William O. Douglas

The dissenting opinions of one generation become the prevailing interpretation of the next. — Burton J. Hendrick

After years spent trying to deal with the effects of COINTELPRO, my rage at the FBI's almost unimaginable evil remains undiminished because I believe that it succeeded in many of its horrifying goals, given the deaths of Martin King, Malcolm X, and other sixties leaders. Since the FBI uses taxpayer dollars to fund its extreme and ridiculous investigations of anyone who expresses dissenting opinions, even resorting to crime - including theft, encouragement to murder, subornation of perjury, and manipulation of the judicial process - to achieve its ends, I have always advocated its disbanding. — William Kunstler

In a number of cases dissenting opinions have in time become the law. — Charles Evans Hughes

If you want criticisms, read the dissenting opinions of the Court. That will give you criticisms. — William Jennings Bryan

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged. — Jimmy Wales

The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises. — Mario Savio

Totalitarian rule thrives on its subjects' ignorance of the extent to which the surveillance system is monitoring their lives. The possibility, rather than the fact, of surveillance is enough to generate fear, anxiety, and informal pressures to conform, to downplay dissenting opinions, to declare one's absolute loyalty. Thus an enforced culture of self-censorship emerges in communities that used to express their political opinions freely. — Arun Kundnani

The Supreme Court is composed of two groups known as the Infallible Five and the Furious Four. The first group writes those majority decisions on patent law that have brought patent lawyers to their present condition. The second groups writes the dissenting opinions, trying to hold to the law as it was laid down by the first groups the week before. The composition of each group shifts from decision to decision, so that no one justice is right all the time. They sort of pass the infallibility around to keep peace in the family." -- The Improbable Profession — Leonard Lockhard

We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic. — Bell Hooks