“When everyone condemns someone, examine the case; when everyone praises someone, examine it as well.” The sentence appears in the “Duke Ling of Wei” chapter of the Analects and is attributed to Confucius. Here, “examine” does not mean distrusting everything in advance, but looking carefully at facts and reasons.
The saying stands as a brief independent passage. Its point is not to oppose the crowd, but to refuse to treat numbers as evidence by themselves. Shared approval or dislike may be well founded, or may arise from fashion, interest or hearsay. In present terms, independent judgement is not automatic contrarianism; it is a refusal to outsource one's conclusion to volume.
https://ctext.org/analects/wei-ling-gong/zh
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