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

March 18, 2025
It’s 90 per cent of the politicians who give the other 10 per cent a bad name.
July 2, 2025
Fame is a vapor; popularity is an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
July 18, 2025
I pay my tax bills more readily than any others—for whether the money is well or ill spent
Page 66 of 126