opinion

See Also: IDEAS

1. As men grow older, their opinions, like their diseases, grow chronic —Josh Billings

   In Billings’ original dialect: Az men gro older their opinuns like thier diseazes, grow kronick.

2. Carried and opened this attitude like an umbrella —Delmore Schwartz
3. Observations … are like children’s cradles … sometimes empty, sometimes full of noisy imbecility, and often lulling to sleep —Sydney Smith

   Smith modestly applied this simile to his own observations.

4. Of three minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds —Wallace Stevens
5. Opinion gathered like a cloud and danced and then seemed to freeze —H. E. Bates
6. Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the center of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other —Arthur Schopenhauer

   Schopenhauer continued his simile like this: “And it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.”

7. Opinion polls: polls are like sleeping pills designed to lull the public into sleeping on election day. You might call them “sleeping polls” —Harry S. Truman
8. Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones, and ultimately flow down to the people, as rain unto the sea —Charles Caleb Colton
9. Opinions, like the temperaments, fell rapidly into pre-established categories —Marguerite Yourcenar
10. Opinions richocheted through the gathering like hyperactive pheromones —Susan Ferraro, New York Times/Hers, Feburary 19, 1987
11. Opinions stout as oak —Phyllis McGinley
12. Passed opinions like gas —Rita Mae Brown
13. Played with our ideas like jacks, pressing our fingertips against their sharp points and round protuberances, testing how many we could scoop up at once —Lynne Sharon Schwartz
14. Public opinion in this country runs like a shower bath. We have no temperature between hot and cold —Heywood Broun

    Broun’s public opinion simile is amongst the best known witticisms born at the famed Algonquin Round Table.

15. Sweeping judgments which are so common are meaningless … like men who salute a whole crowd of people in the mass —Michel De Montaigne
16. The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind —William Blake
17. The pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere; you can’t see it —but, all the same, it is sixteen pounds to the square inch —James R. Lowell, interview with Julian Hawthorne, New York Times, April 2, 1922
18. The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered —Samuel Butler
19. Tosses off insights like the spray from a speedboat —Anon comment about an author’s work

    Like many such complimentary similes, this one was later featured in an ad for the work thus praised.

20. To venture an opinion is like moving a piece at chess: it may be taken, but it forms the beginning of a game that is won —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe