Quotes About Public Opinion

#1. In the long run, much public opinion is made in the universities; ideas generated there filter down through the teaching profession and the students into the general public.

B. Carroll Reece

#2. Public opinion aside, it will be up to the future pope to continue John Paul II's journey to sainthood. Many of the late pope's followers believe he is already there.

Chris Matthews

#3. TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.

David Pietrusza

#4. If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945]

George Orwell

#5. There is a power in public opinion in this country - and I thank God for it: for it is the most honest and best of all powers - which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens.

Martin Van Buren

#6. The Reform Bill has destroyed the ancient conduits and strainers, and brings Public Opinion to act upon the government with the rapid, turbulent, and uncertain violence of a flood!

Robert Peel

#7. I have a strong sense of myself. That gives me a sense of security, you know? If I define myself by things that are always changing, like the public's opinion, or what I'm wearing, or what job I'm doing, there's no stability in that.

Blake Lively

#8. It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Walter Benjamin

#9. You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

Jon Stewart

#10. Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases.

Robert H. Jackson

#11. Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].

Alan Blinder

#12. He never sought to stem the current. [Of a statesman who accommodates his views to public opinion.]

Juvenal

#13. For me, Twitter is a public persona. It's UbuWeb or Kenneth Goldsmith (as opposed to Kenny Goldsmith). I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion (what can you really say in 140 characters?), but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#14. For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.

Mahatma Gandhi

#15. Politicians, after all, are not over a year behind public opinion.

Will Rogers

#16. In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Henry Ward Beecher

#17. We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.

William Bernbach

#18. It is not easy to stand at the bar of public opinion and receive the verdict of condemnation; but what will it be to stand at the bar of God who is greater than all, and to receive from him the sentence of damnation.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#19. There are so many more important things to worry about than how you're perceived by strangers.

Dennis Lehane

#20. Women's bodies are public domain, as evidenced clearly at the present time by the furor over abortion. Everyone has an opinion about what a woman should or should not do with her body.

Maureen Murdock

#21. A statesman, we are told, should follow public opinion. Doubtless, as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins and guiding them.

Augustus Hare

#22. Our union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.

James Buchanan

#23. When the initial effort of political and business leaders to influence public opinion on an issue is to threaten rather than to engage and persuade, they further arouse public opposition rather than win support.

Preston Manning

#24. One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

Alfred De Vigny

#25. You don't change minds in Washington with sweet reason. You do it to the white light of public opinion.

Steve Forbes

#26. Committees kill unconventional ideas for a living.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#27. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.

Thomas Jefferson

#28. Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.

Michael Anti

#29. Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law.

George Orwell

#30. Press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the ...

Walter Benjamin

#31. Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.

Viktor E. Frankl

#32. Contrary to common public opinion, Iraq is not simply about oil. It is also about water and geopolitics. Both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through Iraq; thus, of all the countries in that part of the world, Iraq controls the most important sources of increasingly critical water resources.

John Perkins

#33. The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

Ludwig Von Mises

#34. China's critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime's obsession with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion.

Anonymous

#35. Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.

Nicolas Chamfort

#36. The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.

Brian Greene

#37. There is nothing in the world that could make me turn from the law. With a clear conscience, I am prepared to answer for each and every one of my political and administrative orders and actions, and to do so before the court of public opinion ...

Djemal Pasha

#38. Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.

James Madison

#39. According to the experience of all but the most accomplished jugglers, it is easier to keep one ball in the air than many.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#40. Public opinion alone can keep a society pure and healthy.

Mahatma Gandhi

#41. The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.

Charles Darwin

#42. Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Walter Bagehot

#43. Because I have an opinion, I have become public enemy number one to the Fox News Channel and the right wing.

Michael Moore

#44. Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion.

James F. Cooper

#45. Public opinion, - a tyrant, sitting in the dark, wrapt up in mystification and vague terrors of obscurity; deriving power no one knows from whom ... - but irresistible in its power to quell thought, to repress action, to silence conviction ...

Harriet Martineau

#46. One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

Douglas MacArthur

#47. I think with you, that nothing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are in my opinion, the strength of the state; more so than riches or arms.

Benjamin Franklin

#48. We shall no longer hang on to the tails of public opinion or to a non- existent authority on matters utterly unknown and strange. We shall gradually become experts ourselves in the mastery of the knowledge of the Future.

Wilhelm Reich

#49. As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me ... And now the work's done, there's only death.

Leo Tolstoy

#50. Sound conviction should influence us rather than public opinion.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#51. Until ... the promiscuous woman is recognized, not only in law but in public opinion, as being neither better nor worse than the promiscuous man, equality has not been won in the moral sphere.

Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

#52. I think you can not be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Dick Cheney

#53. I believe if a private citizen is able to affect public opinion in a constructive way he doesn't have to be an elected public servant to perform a public service.

Warren Beatty

#54. I've seen public opinion shift like the wind and put out the very fire it lighted.

Rachel Field

#55. A government can be no better than the public opinion which sustains it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#56. Opinion pages have an impact on public debate, and they sometimes reveal things the government would rather have kept quiet.

Andrew Rosenthal

#57. Non-co-operation is the quickest method of creating public opinion.

Mahatma Gandhi

#58. He did not consider public opinion to be accurate at long range.

Stephen Crane

#59. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round.

Ira Gershwin

#60. While public opinion might sway back and forth, right and wrong do not.

Andy Andrews

#61. A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.

William Cobbett

#62. Public opinion is the judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of the discerning few.

Elbert Hubbard

#63. In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.

Neil Postman

#64. What we call public opinion is generally public sentiment.

Benjamin Disraeli

#65. Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

Mark Twain

#66. In these days of intellectual awakening and steadily asserting public opinion, the holy places of the Hindus, their condition, and method of work have not escaped tile keen eye of criticism; and this city, being the holy of holies to all Hindus, has not failed to attract its full share of censure.

Swami Vivekananda

#67. If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

Abraham Lincoln

#68. The intelligent minority are a "specialized class" who are responsible for setting policy and for "the formation of a sound public opinion,

Noam Chomsky

#69. The only remaining superpower is international public opinion.

Simon Anholt

#70. With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion.

Noreena Hertz

#71. Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.

Oscar Wilde

#72. Today, parliaments are more important because of the need of legitimacy, of the popular legitimacy, of public opinion legitimacy of politics. Parliaments are, at the end of the day, the only true legitimacy.

Enrico Letta

#73. To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#74. From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.

Johan Huizinga

#75. So Republican candidates bash Obamacare and move up in the polls. Given that public opinion remains firmly against the health care law - as it has been for years - that's not a shock. Democratic beliefs to the contrary are probably wishful thinking.

Byron York

#76. Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.

Martha Gellhorn

#77. Satyagraha is a process of educating public opinion, such that it covers all the elements of the society and in the end makes itself irresistible.

Mahatma Gandhi

#78. Service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it. When it is done for show or for fear of public opinion, it stunts the man and crushes his spirit. Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

Mahatma Gandhi

#79. There are some people whose opinion I value and respect and it would be very bothersome if I forfeited their respect. But the general public? I'm not preoccupied with the opinions of others.

Conrad Black

#80. I think if more members of Congress would talk about what they see and what they want to do and what they want to accomplish, rather than talking about their opponent, we would begin to shape and reshape American public opinion on what the political world looks like.

Reid Ribble

#81. Because the task of a political leader is to do what he believes is better for his country. Sometimes the public opinion is in favor; sometimes the public opinion needs a little bit more time to understand things.

Jose Maria Aznar

#82. If public opinion still endorses military action that's one thing, but if they wait maybe it will not. So it's not only impatience, but there are several other factors.

Hans Blix

#83. The course of business shapes public opinion.

Marvin Bower

#84. Garrison had spent decades defending the agitation of public opinion both as a necessary, permanent feature of democracy and as an effective way to change politics in a democracy from the outside.

W. Caleb McDaniel

#85. Painting is a faith and that it brings with it the duty to pay no heed to public opinion - and that in it one conquers by perseverance and not by giving in.

Vincent Van Gogh

#86. I believe that in the end the abolition of war, the maintenance of world peace, the adjustment of international questions by pacific means will come through the force of public opinion, which controls nations and peoples.

Frank B. Kellogg

#87. But on the big things, I'm not going to trim in order to win public opinion. Because I really don't want to serve in the Senate if I arrive there without permission to do the things I think need to be done.

Bob Kerrey

#88. The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms in practice the freedom asserted by the laws in theory.

Thomas Jefferson

#89. I don't know what is stronger or what is weaker.The whole language of strength and weaknesses is irrelevant,because when you use arms you do not use ballots, and public opinion is unimportant, and they shoot at their opponents.

Shimon Peres

#90. I am of opinion that a central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#91. It is only through an abandonment of the idea that those entrusted with power have an exclusive right to decide upon war, and the substitution of a public opinion equipped with all the facts and taken into the confidence of the ruling classes, that peace can be assured to the world.

Frederic C. Howe

#92. An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion.

Tullian Tchividjian

#93. Due to the fact that I experienced personally the situation of a political prisoner, I have an historical commitment to all those that were or are prisoners just because they expressed their views, their public opinion, their own opinions.

Dilma Rousseff

#94. It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.

Marquis De Sade

#95. The real purveyors of the news are artists, for artists are the ones who infuse fact with perception, emotion, and appreciation ... We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason.

John Dewey

#96. I believe the role that people like myself have played in the transformation of public opinion has been by persistently presenting a different point of view, a point of view which stresses the importance of private markets, of individual freedom, and the distorting effect of governmental policy.

Milton Friedman

#97. When men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

Benjamin Franklin

#98. Religion of the masses is absurd. But so is their science!

Raheel Farooq

#99. In war, the moral element and public opinion are half the battle.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#100. Ask everyone whether they're an actor or a doctor or a teacher or whatever is entitled to his or her opinion. But unfortunately, because actors are in the public eye, whether we want it or not, sometimes our opinions carry more weight or influence than they deserve.

Debra Messing