It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
Interpretation
Diverse opinions, especially from minorities, drive societal progress and improve collective understanding.
This quote emphasizes the importance of dissenting opinions in the advancement of knowledge and understanding. It suggests that societal progress often stems from the actions and ideas of minorities who challenge the majority's views, pushing everyone to rethink and improve upon existing beliefs and practices.
In practice
In a discussion about innovation, one might quote this to highlight how new ideas often come from unconventional thinkers.
What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.
The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is.
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.
You can stay angry at someone who hurt you. Or you can get busy doing your visions and changing our world. But you don't get to do both.
Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.
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