Minorities

(221 votes)   A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862, American Essayist, Poet, Naturalist

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(158 votes)   Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(145 votes)   Beware the tyranny of the minority.

Latin Proverbs
Sayings of Latin Origin

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(119 votes)   We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(101 votes)   Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(99 votes)   All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(97 votes)   In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

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(93 votes)   No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
1882-1945, Thirty-second President of the USA

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(93 votes)   You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.

Woodrow T. Wilson
1856-1924, Twenty-eighth President of the USA

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(81 votes)   Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority.

Soren Kierkegaard
1813-1855, Danish Philosopher, Writer

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(70 votes)   How a minority, reaching majority, seizing authority, hates a minority!

Leonard H. Robbins

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(69 votes)   It is always the minorities that hold the key of progress.

Raymond B. Fosdick

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(68 votes)   A minority is always compelled to think. That is the blessing of being in the minority.

Leo Baeck
1873-?, Jewish Religious Leader, Lecturer

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