50 tweets on Prejudice and Public Opinion (by John Henry Newman)

1. Prejudice is an impression, which reason indeed can act upon, and the will can subdue, but only by degrees and with trouble.
2. Prejudice sank into the mind by the repetition of untrue representations.
3. A lie is a lie just as much the tenth time it is told as the first; but it gains in rhetorical influence.
4. At length the lie will assume the shape of a respectable fact or opinion, which is held by a considerable number of well-informed persons.
5. Prejudice must be effaced by an opposite process, by a succession of thoughts and deeds antagonistic to it.
6. But prejudice is not at all innocent or excusable, just the reverse.
7. The will goes with a prejudice; there is no compulsion or necessity.
8. Those who have prejudices are unwilling to give them up; there is no prejudice without the will.
9. Prejudice seem to me to corrupt the soul. It argues so astonishing a want of mere natural charity or love of our kind.
10. Anything is startling and grotesque, if taken out of its place, and surveyed without reference to the whole to which it belongs.
11. Our Prejudiced Man of course sees Catholics and Jesuits in everything, in every failure of the potato crop, every strike and every mercantile stoppage.
12. While a community is overrun with prejudices, it is as premature to attempt to prove that doctrine to be true.
13. It is the voice of the people, which gives facts their complexion, and logic its course, and ideas their definition.
14. What would a Sunday newspaper be without trials, accidents, and offences?
15. Falsehood succeeds for a generation, or for a period; but there it has its full course and comes to an end.
16. No traditions have a claim upon us which shrink from criticism, and dare not look a rival in the face.
17. Your artificial flowers have the softness and brilliancy of nature, till you bring in the living article, fresh from the garden.
18. Truth is eternal; it is great, and will prevail. The end is the proof of things.
19. This is a great principle to keep in view: (…) popular opinion only acts through local opinion.
20. No one is known in London; it is the realm of the incognito and the anonymous; it is not a place, it is a region or a state.
21. The great metropolitan intellect cannot be reached by us, because you cannot confront it, you cannot make it know you.
22. You cannot make an impression on such an ocean of units; it has no disposition, no connexion of parts.
23. There is no such thing as local opinion in the metropolis; mutual personal knowledge, there is none; neighborhood, there is none.
24. Local opinion is real public opinion; but there cannot be such in London.
25. How is a man to show what he is, when he is but a grain of sand out of a mass, without relations to others, without individuality?
26. Words cannot hurt us till they are taken up, believed, in the very place where we individually dwell.
27. The opinion of London can only act on me through Birmingham opinion.
28. London abuses Catholics. "Catholic" is a word; where is the thing? In Liverpool, in Manchester, in Birmingham, in Leeds, in Sheffield….
29. In order to carry out your London manifesto, you must get the people of Birmingham, Manchester, and the rest.
30. Local opinion is so much more healthy, English, and Christian than popular or metropolitan opinion.
31. Local opinion is not of ideas, but of things; not of words, but of facts; not of names, but of persons; it is perspicuous, real and sure.
32. London cannot act on me except through Birmingham, and Birmingham indeed can act on me, but I can act on Birmingham.
33. Let each approve himself in his own neighborhood; if each portion is defended, the whole is secured.
34. Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.
35. Let the London press alone; do not appeal to it; do not expostulate with it, do not flatter it (…); cultivate local.
36. I said your victory was to be in forcing upon others a personal knowledge of you, by your standing before your enemies face to face.
37. The great instrument of propagating moral truth is personal knowledge.
38. Your one and almost sole object, I say, must be, to make yourselves known.
39. The more we are known, the more we shall be esteemed.
40. A man finds himself in a definite place; he grows up in it and into it; he draws persons around him; they know him, he knows them.
41. Ideas are born which are to live, that works begin which are to last.
42. They must be made to know us as we are; they must be made to know our religion as it is, not as they fancy it.
43. I would aim primarily at edification, cultivation of mind, growth of the reason.
44. It is a moral force, not a material, which will vindicate your profession, and will secure your triumph. 
45. It is not giants who do most. How small was the Holy Land! Yet it subdued the world.
46. I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but who know their religion.
47. I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth.
48. We must make it up to the injured party by acts of kindness, by friendly services, by good words.
49. Show candour, generosity, honourable feeling, good sense, and forbearance, in spite of provocation.
50. Try to interpret the actions of all in the best sense you possibly can. 

From: 

John Henry Newman

Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England

1852