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

July 24, 2025
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
September 6, 2025
00:29
Prejudice is the raft unto which the ship-wrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
January 5, 2025
00:56
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness,
Page 78 of 126