Lastly they say they always believed it. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
Every man alone is sincere.
At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after. An ascendant man, living in a degenerate age, must, by definition, live in contradistinction to his times. Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.