To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
Interpretation
Challenging popular opinions requires immense bravery and integrity.
The quote emphasizes that standing up against widely accepted beliefs or popular opinions, especially among friends and peers, is a significant and courageous act. It highlights the difficulty of maintaining one's convictions in the face of social pressure, suggesting that true heroism often lies in the willingness to be different or to challenge the status quo.
In practice
In a discussion on social issues, this quote can inspire individuals to voice unpopular opinions.
Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
Power in America today is control of the means of communication.
I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.
I'm looking to no man walking this earth for approval of what I'm doing.
Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself when apparent to the eyes ; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about.
The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.
When danger is far off we may think of our weakness; when it is near we must not forget our strength.
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