To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
Interpretation
Challenging popular opinions requires immense bravery and integrity.
The quote emphasizes that standing up against widely accepted beliefs or popular opinions, especially among friends and peers, is a significant and courageous act. It highlights the difficulty of maintaining one's convictions in the face of social pressure, suggesting that true heroism often lies in the willingness to be different or to challenge the status quo.
In practice
In a discussion on social issues, this quote can inspire individuals to voice unpopular opinions.
Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
Power in America today is control of the means of communication.
I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs all the courage to go further.
The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery
The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
Nowadays we are assailed by a chorus of horrid threats. The Nazi Government exudes through every neutral State inside information of the frightful vengeance they are going to wreak upon us, and they also bawl it around the world by their leather-lunged propaganda machine. If words could kill, we should be dead already.
Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.
The two great risks are risking too much but also risking too little. That's for each person to decide. For me, not risking anything is worse than death. By far.
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