All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
Adlai Stevenson I
A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai Stevenson II
Geek culture is all about being super passionate about your interests and not afraid to express them, even if your interests are unpopular.
Alan Schaaf
Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?
Albert Einstein
By not caring too much about what people think, I'm able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.
Albert Ellis
My singing voice had rescued me from the scene I was in at school - I was an unpopular, bookish kid who had an indeterminate ethnic background. I became fascinated with women sopranos because they had a future that I didn't as a singer.
Alexander Chee
Professors who hold unpopular positions or state inconvenient facts are now considered psychologically toxic.
Amy Wax
A lot of the progress in machine learning - and this is an unpopular opinion in academia - is driven by an increase in both computing power and data. An analogy is to building a space rocket: You need a huge rocket engine, and you need a lot of fuel.
Andrew Ng
Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans' various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.
Angus Deaton
Great political leaders risk unpopularity, patiently explain their case and confront prejudice, bigotry and vested interests.
Ann Widdecombe
I left the Church of England because there was a huge bundle of straw. The ordination of women was the last straw, but it was only one of many. For years I had been disillusioned by the Church of England's compromising on everything. The Catholic Church doesn't care if something is unpopular.
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
My favourite moment from the Oscars was when Brando didn't attend and sent a Native American woman to talk about Wounded Knee. She delivered a very unpopular and lengthy monologue about the injustice for indigenous people in North America. It was one of the greatest moments in American television.
Anohni
You have plaintiffs attorneys, you have defense attorneys. So there is no unified bar that will protect a particular judge who has made a courageous decision that's unpopular.
Anthony Kennedy
Hope - I wanted to give to that to the people. When you do that, you have to be willing to be unpopular. It's not the formula for radio songs.
August Alsina
The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl's mother.
Ayelet Waldman
In this era in which we live, the old-fashioned virtues grow increasingly unpopular.
B. Carroll Reece
There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.
Barack Obama
The unpopularity of raising corporate or personal income tax has been a straight jacket constraining Labour's thinking on how best to invest and grow the economy.
Barry Gardiner
It's true that the Federal Reserve faces a lot of political pressure and is unpopular in many circles.
Ben Bernanke
The Federal Reserve's job is to do the right thing, to take the long-run interest of the economy to heart, and that sometimes means being unpopular. But we have to do the right thing.
President Obama has only had two major policy victories during his tenure: the stimulus package and Obamacare. Both are massively unpopular. The stimulus package launched the Tea Party movement. Obamacare led to the Republican wipeout of 2010.
I am not concerned about getting reelected. I can make the unpopular but necessary decision. Your focus from day one is on your legacy rather than political considerations.
I am not unaware how unpopular on this floor are the sentiments I am about to advocate.
You've got to ensure that the holders of an opinion, however unpopular, are allowed to put across their points of view.
Governors of both political parties face a stark choice between unpopular tax increases and drastic cuts in Medicaid, education, public safety and other essential services.
People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.
I'm actually starting to like more and more people who have convictions that are unpopular.
If you drop a channel, you're incredibly unpopular, and if you pass along a rate increase, you're incredibly unpopular.
I think there are districts - a lot of them - where Donald Trump is deeply unpopular, and tying your opponent to Donald Trump's unpopularity is a winning strategy. But that's not true for every district.
When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.
What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.
I am thrilled and proud of Benjamin Watson for speaking up on behalf of innocent black lives, traditionally an unpopular stance in the mainstream media.
The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.
You're saying 'will it become politically unpopular to have the position I'm having.' If it does, so be it.
I'm not afraid of making big and sometimes unpopular calls if they're the right thing to do.
At 13, in my first year of Tonbridge, I went up for the part of Macbeth. I was up against the 17- and 18-year-olds, but for some reason I got the part. It made me incredibly unpopular with my peers, but it was the English and drama teachers who stepped in to save me when others wanted me kicked out of the school.
The Army confronted racial integration when it was still unpopular in society. It has been struggling to more fully integrate women. Its troops, after all, reflect society.
'Cosmopolitan' used to publish five covers across the U.S. so that if one was unpopular, it wouldn't tank their entire sales.
You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.
When historians look at the Obama presidency, they're likely to credit him especially for doing the politically unpopular things that were needed in 2009 to salvage the financial wreckage.
Obama hasn't been divisive just because his policies are so unpopular, though that's a large part of it.
I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.
Democratic candidates who run from President Obama in red states where he is unpopular are making a big mistake. Their holding Obama at arm's length deprives voters of a clear choice at the ballot box.
I think President Bush tried to step up on Social Security even though the polls showed that was unpopular. He has not been successful and backed off, but I admire people who take on big problems.
It's easy to be popular when you don't make the decisions a president makes. And it's easy to be unpopular when you're the president because you're making decisions that at the time might seem unpopular; but when historians sort it out, it changes.
Of course we need to show we are a genuine alternative to an unpopular, Conservative-led government. But we need to set ourselves a higher standard than a party offering anger like UKIP.
I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.
Republicans' focus on defunding or scaling back Obamacare - an unpopular entitlement program - rather than entitlements generally, namely Social Security and Medicare, has raised questions about their true objective. But critics forget that spending is fungible.
I have been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life. I have not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause.
