Quotes Library

October 22, 2025

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

Sydney Smith (1771–1845), English clergyman, essayist, H. Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (1934), Jay p.344

Was not the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus right, that all the world is in flux? And is it not true that most change is incremental, and that change-agents begin as a tiny group that grows? That this minority—who first broached the change that so many other have embraced over time—is then (almost) always right?

Right, as to substance, maybe. But right because they have the right to exist, absolutely.


More Quotes

February 21, 2025
I believe democracy to be of all forms of government the most natural, the most consonant with individual liberty.
November 7, 2025
Europeans often ask and Americans do not often explain, how it happens that this great office [the presidency]
January 1, 2025
01:26
Why was government instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not
Page 20 of 126