Casual

...I am content not to go beyond the subtlety of the Hollywood producer who is said to have divided all the screenplays sent him into two categories: "Piece of Crap" and "Not a Piece of Crap...

...Casual NO OPINION During a question-and-answer period following one of his lectures, the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was asked what he thought about England's place in the European Union...

...Naipaul says of a character whom he loathes that "she had a great many opinions but taken together these did not add up to a point of view...

...For many people, political opinions are to be worn, like designer clothes, for their brand quality...

...Not necessary," I said, "if you'll just give me back my assumptions...

...A better test is if you think well of someone despite his opinions...

...Especially has this become so in the realm of popular culture...

...They make a specialty of knocking down your opinions, no matter how trivial...

...Attend the christening, by all means, but I wouldn't send a gift...

...I'm not such an immitigable highbrow that I don't watch movies or my share of television, but I just don't feel the need to deliver finely honed opinions about them...

...In the political realm, of course, judging people on their opinions is trickiest of all...

...That seems to me to get the notion of opinion in right perspective: as something transient, arbitrary, and shallow...

...Such things as The Matrix, the rise of rap music, the fall of the sitcom, the future of the Women's National Basketball Association, and a number of other items touching on the epiphenomena of the ephemeral do not qualify as requiring my opinion...

...Why, exactly, would you say it's a nice day...

...On the movie The Matrix and its sequel, for example, I have no need to weigh in with a penetrating, or even banal, insight...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...If she felt the need of opinion in the article, he added, he would be only too glad to supply his own...

...Yet congruence of opinion isn't a good test for judging character...

...Economists trained at the University of Chicago can be death on the thinness, the utter airiness, of much opinion...

...More disturbing still is to encounter someone whose opinions on a great many subjects are very close to your own whom you recognize as unmistakably a creep...

...I myself have had no difficulty loving women who wanted to, and others who didn't in the least care about, saving the whale...

...My own preference is for people who have the independence and confidence to proclaim perfectly heterodox opinions in hostile territory...

...I once read a letter that Edward Shils wrote to a young contributor of his magazine, Minerva, in which he offered to publish an article she had sent him if she would remove the opinions in the article, which he found callow and untrue...

...He takes his politics from Moscow," an old put-down of fashionable left-wingers used to run, "and his cooking from Paris...

...I know a woman who is trying to break up her dearest friend's dalliance with a man whose standard Republican politics she, the first woman, despises: How can one possibly love a man who isn't pro-choice...

...I like to think that I have by now a point of view: a reasonably settled sense of what is and isn't significant in life...

...This is a subject best left to those pop culture punditi who specialize in being ten minutes ahead of the With-It Express...

...But just as it wouldn't do to make a final judgment on a woman for wearing a DKNY T-shirt, neither is it smart to admire a man simply because he believes in the Invisible Hand of the market...

...Someone at a meeting of, say, the Modern Language Association who says that he is nuts about the singing of Wayne Newton...

...Crudity and Falsehood copulate," wrote Paul Valéry, "and give birth to Opinion...

...I imagine there must be an intellectual somewhere who has averred he could not possibly love a woman who does not hold the novels of Thomas Pynchon in high esteem...

...I don't," Oakeshott replied, "see that I am required to have an opinion on that...

...Being a textured thinker, I would sometimes call upon a third category: "Not Entirely a Piece of Crap...

...When last I lunched with my late cousin, the Chicago economist Sherwin Rosen, who was very good at this, he asked if he could pay his share of the lunch...

...Most of us search for people whose opinions are roughly congruent with our own, believing, I suppose, that anyone who doesn't share our distastes is himself distasteful...

...Or a woman who announces that she thinks pro football an elegant sport...

...Other people's opinions, on popular culture, and much else, help us feel them out...

...In his novel Guerrillas, V.S...

...I don't happen to think that politics are always, or even often, a strong index of character, especially since so many people's politics don't really touch their lives...

...I found that response very helpful, for more and more things crop up on which I, too, feel having an opinion is unnecessary...