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.
African American patriotic heroism is always a curious spectacle. Often white political observers and politicians will praise Black people for their bravery, privately in awe of a people who continue to risk their lives for a country that will still barely let them vote.
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.
To lose your everyday life of surfing and being creative on waves, enjoying the ocean - that's scary to me. It was essential to at least try surfing again and get out there and see how it went.
The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories, and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny.
But whoso is heroic must find crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds.
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.
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