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In the long run, truth is aided by nothing so much as by opposition.
Sep 10, 2025
we must continue to be open in the face of great opposition. No one is encouraging us to be open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.
This earth is not our home. We are away at school, trying to master the lessons of "the great plan of happiness" so we can return home and know what it means to be there. Over and over the Lord tells us why the plan is worth our sacrifice - and His. Eve called it "the joy of our redemption." Jacob called it "that happiness which is prepared for the saints." Of necessity, the plan is full of thorns and tears - His and ours. But because He and we are so totally in this together, our being "at one" with Him in overcoming all opposition will itself bring us "incomprehensible joy."
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher. ... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same.
Conservatives are tougher. They fight harder, they fight for their own, and they're willing to win for themselves and they're willing to impose pain on the opposition. Liberals are much less willing to do that. They're much more - they would much rather give to everybody.
We already have a sabbatical system. It's called opposition, and I've had enough of it.
Any great change must expect opposition, because it shakes the very foundation of privilege.
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.
John Prescott has made the government look greedy and ridiculous. Labour is seen as the corrupt party. The government has been fulfilling the old rule that oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them.
You can do a lot things in the ensuing four years waiting to vote. You can drum up support or opposition.
The more success [Donald] Trump has, the greater the energy poured into opposing him is gonna be. If you are thinking that at some point in these next four years that the opposition to Trump is going to lay down arms, so to speak, and join him, that's never gonna happen.
Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity.
There is nothing good that does not meet with opposition, and it should not be valued any less because it encounters objections.
People face difficulties, no matter who you are. I faced difficulties with a lot of things. I face opposition every day, but I didn't kill myself and now, thank God, I'm here.
Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself.
If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny.
To go behind a man's hall-door is mean, cowardly, unfair opposition.
[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution.
An intelligent and conscientious opposition is a part of loyalty to country.
You mustn't compromise your principles, but you mustn't humiliate the opposition. No one is more dangerous than one who is humiliated.
Allow me to draw your attention to the value and beauty of marriage. The complementarity of man and woman, the vertex of the divine creation, is being questioned by gender ideology, in the name of a freer and more just society. The difference between man and woman is not meant to stand in opposition, or to subordinate, but is for the sake of communion and generation, always 'in the image and likeness of God.'
The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists... Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed - not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.
Indignant reply to the blatent sex discrimination expressed in a colleague's opposition when Hilbert proposed appointing Emmy Noether as the first woman professor at their university.
With genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race. But it will be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the effect of changes to the genetic code. By contrast, computers double their speed and memories every 18 months. There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.
According to "Huffington Post", one Democratic opposition research firm said they spent the past eight months compiling material on [Donald] Trump as he`s risen on the ranks. And that research estimated that if the all material compiled, court and property records,newspaper clips and video, approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.
A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties.
The Opposition aren't really the Opposition. They're just called the Opposition. But in fact they are the Opposition in exile. The Civil Service are the Opposition in residence.
I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects I would meet it by political opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled.
Part of what's unique about climate change, though, is the nature of some of the opposition to action. It's pretty rare that you'll encounter somebody who says the problem you're trying to solve simply doesn't exist. When President Kennedy set us on a course for the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn't be worth it; it was going to be too expensive, it was going to be too hard, it would take too long. But nobody ignored the science. I don't remember anybody saying that the moon wasn't there or that it was made of cheese.
All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.
The fear of meeting the opposition of envy, or the illiberality of ignorance is, no doubt, the frequent cause of preventing many ingenious men from ushering opinions into the world which deviate from common practice. Hence for want of energy, the young idea is shackled with timidity and a useful thought is buried in the impenetrable gloom of eternal oblivion.
I think the media, the boxing public hasn't seen me at my best simply because great opposition brings out the best in you.
My only problem is the fear that opposition bowlers might go for my fingers and that's why I was scared of the short ball. Now I am struggling with the ball pitching up and swinging away. I just keep nicking that one.
A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.
If you want to really sort of quantify the dereliction of the Republican establishment, those two facts are the most important two facts. One, that they didn`t even understand the base of their own party, white working class voters who you know what, don`t care about tax cuts for the rich, really aren`t interested in the things that the elite part of their party want, including immigration reform. And number two, they spent eight months avoiding finding opposition research to use against the guy who was becoming the front-runner in their party that they don`t want.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that 'if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression', human rights should be protected by the rule of law. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.
Grace stands in direct opposition to any supposed worthiness on our part. To say it another way: Grace and works are mutually exclusive. As Paul said in Romans 11:6, "And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace." Our relationship with God is based on either works or grace. There is never a works-plus-grace relationship with Him.
We make allowance for a certain degree of selfishness in men; because we know it to be inseparable from human nature, and inherent in our frame and constitution. By this reflexion we correct those sentiments of blame, which so naturally arise upon any opposition.
A ground frequently taken by Christian theologians is that the progress and civilization of the world are due to Christianity; and the discussion is complicated by the fact that many eminent servants of humanity have been nominal Christians, of one or other of the sects. My allegation will be that the special services rendered to human progress by these exceptional men have not been in consequence of their adhesion to Christianity, but in spite of it, and that the specific points of advantage to human kind have been in ratio of their direct opposition to precise Biblical enactments.
Air forces offered the possibility of striking a the enemy's economic and moral centres without having first to achieve 'the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield'. Air-power might attain a direct end by indirect means - hopping over opposition instead of overthrowing it.
Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn't worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn't have provoked so much opposition.
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.
INFALAPSARIAN, n. One who ventures to believe that Adam need not have sinned unless he had a mind to - in opposition to the Supralapsarians, who hold that that luckless person's fall was decreed from the beginning.
A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a diffrance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determination, etc., such that in designating consciousness as an effect or a determination, one continues - for strategic reasons that can be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated - to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-limiting.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is one of the reasons we have a coal-dependent infrastructure, with the resulting environmental impact that all of us can see. I suspect environmentalists, through their opposition of nuclear power, have caused more coal plants to be built than anybody. And those coal plants have emitted more radioactive material from the coal than any nuclear accident would have.
It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.