#opinion

What we need are not prohibitory marriage laws, but a reformed society, an educated public opinion which will teach individual duty in these matters. ↗

— Alfred Russel Wallace

#educated #individual #laws #marriage #matters

China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities. ↗

— Ai Weiwei

#attitudes #authorities #censored #china #chinese

Now the British are coming. I think Cameron should ask the Chinese government not to make people 'disappear' or to jail them merely because they have different opinions. ↗

— Ai Weiwei

#because #british #cameron #chinese #chinese government

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity. ↗

— Ai Weiwei

#any #anyone #art #avoids #been

Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. ↗

— Francis Wright

#grounds #into #look #nature #opinions

[Women] complain about many clerks who attribute all sorts of faults to them and who compose works about them in rhyme, prose, and verse, criticizing their conduct in a variety of different ways. They then give these works as elementary textbooks to their young pupils at the beginning of their schooling, to provide them with exempla and received wisdom, so that they will remember this teaching when they come of age ... They accuse [women] of many ... serious vice[s] and are very critical of them, finding no excuse for them whatsoever. This is the way clerks behave day and night, composing their verse now in French, now in Latin. And they base their opinions on goodness only knows which books, which are more mendacious than a drunk. Ovid, in a book he wrote called Cures for Love, says many evil things about women, and I think he was wrong to do this. He accuses them of gross immorality, of filthy, vile, and wicked behaviour. (I disagree with him that they have such vices and promise to champion them in the fight against anyone who would like to throw down the gauntlet ...) Thus, clerks have studied this book since their early childhood as their grammar primer and then teach it to others so that no man will undertake to love a woman. ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#clichés #double-standards #empowerment #falsehood #gender

We read to lend words to our expe­ri­ence. As we read, we trans­late, as it were, the author’s words into our own expe­ri­ence, enlarg­ing the mean­ing of those words, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion. Not find­ing just any mean­ing, of course, if we read hon­estly, but mean­ings that many times escaped even the author, who is often the least shrewd of the read­ers of that text. We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#experience

Those who are of the opinion that money will do everything may reasonably be expected to do everything for money. ↗

— Edward F. Halifax

#expected #may #money #opinion #reasonably

A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity. ↗

— Robert Hall

#confide #equally #friend #once #opinion

It is because I believe that it is in the power of such nations to lead the world back into the paths of peace that I propose to devote myself to explaining what, in my opinion, can and should be done to banish the fear of war that hangs so heavily over the world. ↗

— Arthur Henderson

#banish #because #believe #devote #done