“Few men think; yet all have opinions.”

Source: All That Matters (1922), p.50 - Clinching the Bolt, stanza 3.

Source: The Art of Always Being Right

Source: Problems Of Humanity (1944), p. 13

King v. Pasmore (1789), 3 T. R. 243.

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part IV: Where do we go from here, p. 356.

1790s, First Principles of Government (1795)
Context: It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.

§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 244
Context: Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naiveté, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them. To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.