Quotes About Public Opinion

#1. Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans.

H.L. Mencken

#2. Influential people aren't buffeted by the latest trend or by public opinion. They form their opinions carefully, based on the facts. They're more than willing to change their mind when the facts support it, but they aren't influenced by what other people think - only by what they know.

Travis Bradberry

#3. At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

Gore Vidal

#4. This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based on focus groups. We will not take a stand based on phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of pubic opinion.

Stephen Harper

#5. The World War broke out with such elemental violence, and with such resort to all means for leading or misleading public opinion, that no time was available for reflection and consideration.

Hjalmar Branting

#6. The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.

Walter Lippmann

#7. The Iranian government intends to use the nuclear program for peaceful purposes, but must convince international public opinion of that.

Shirin Ebadi

#8. One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Bertrand Russell

#9. Don't be the victim of public opinion.

Sunday Adelaja

#10. The court doesn't follow public opinion. The court's views are radically out of step with public opinion.

Ted Cruz

#11. The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.

Spiro T. Agnew

#12. The polls are just being used as another tool of voter suppression. The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you.

Rush Limbaugh

#13. Volcker relied on public opinion, integrity, and persistence to overcome the political pressure to finance government spending the easy way, by printing money rather than by taxation.

William L. Silber

#14. There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress.

Gloria Steinem

#15. Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#16. I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does.

Christopher Hitchens

#17. The more effective the chauvinistic propaganda, the easier it was to persuade public opinion of the necessity for a supranational structure which would rule from above and without national distinctions by a universal monopoly of power and the instruments of violence.

Hannah Arendt

#18. Public opinion takes no offense at the endeavors of farmers, workers, clerks, teachers, doctors, ministers, and people from many other callings to earn as much as they can. But it censures the capitalists and entrepreneurs for their greed.

Ludwig Von Mises

#19. It is a mournful fact that most men, and indeed all men of worldly character, have so much regard to public opinion that they dare not act according to the dictates of their consciences when acting thus would incur the popular frown.

Charles Grandison Finney

#20. The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens...If it can not live in the affections of its people, it must die.

James Buchanan

#21. The revolutionary despises public opinion. He despises and hates the existing social morality in all its manifestations. For him, morality is everything which contributes to the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way.

Sergey Nechayev

#22. The Press, which is mostly controlled by vested interests, has an excessive influence on public opinion.

Albert Einstein

#23. Public opinion should not be confused with popular sentiment. Popular sentiment is what people say to one another around their dinner tables. Popular opinion is what they say to callers from polling organizations.

Richard Brookhiser

#24. Spreading the word about depression is my mission. I am working to build awareness, educate people about the symptoms, and change public opinion and individual attitudes about depression.

Susan Polis Schutz

#25. Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'

W.E.B. Du Bois

#26. I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don't read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2's audience.

Bono

#27. I will, based on the existing ROC constitutional system, based on democratic principles, on the basis of the largest public opinion, promote cross-strait policy.

Tsai Ing-wen

#28. I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.

E. O. Wilson

#29. What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#30. I try not to read newspapers when I have a movie coming out, but I guess I'm not immune to public opinion. I'm hurt by it.

Anna Faris

#31. No minister ever stood, or could stand, against public opinion.

Robert Peel

#32. The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of woman, and I am glad of it. We are willing to bear the brunt of thestorm, if we can only be the means of making a break in that wall of public opinion which lies right in the way of woman's rights, true dignity, honor and usefulness.

Angelina Grimke

#33. The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.

George Bancroft

#34. The line of least resistance in the progress of civilization is to make that theoretical postulate real by the continually increasing force of the world's public opinion.

Elihu Root

#35. After a decade of war you have this Pentagon-military apparatus run amok using resources that they shouldn't be to try to manipulate U.S. public opinion.

Michael Hastings

#36. Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the ten commandments.

Charles Dudley Warner

#37. The heaviest restriction upon the freedom of public opinion is not the official censorship of the Press, but the unofficial censorship by a Press which exists not so much to express opinion as to manufacture it.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#38. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.

Abraham Lincoln

#39. From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.

Emmeline Pankhurst

#40. Neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point.

Bertrand Russell

#41. It is often noted that it can be hard for democracies to fight wars because of changing public opinion.

Noah Feldman

#42. Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women's movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.

Gloria Steinem

#43. The Soviet Union's propaganda clearly wishes to use public opinion in this country to get the West to reduce its own arms while doing nothing themselves. In this way they would gain nuclear superiority. This is simply not on.

James Callaghan

#44. President Wilson says a leader must treat public opinion the way a sailor deals with the wind, using it to blow the ship in one direction or another, but never trying to go directly against it.

Ken Follett

#45. What is public opinion? It is private indolence.

Georg Brandes

#46. We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox, wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, some of us are tossed helpless ... ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants
PUBLIC OPINION.

H. P. Blavatsky

#47. A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion.

Grantland Rice

#48. Those who based decisions on principle, not some snapshot of public opinion, were often vindicated over time.

George W. Bush

#49. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.

John Stuart Mill

#50. There is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#51. Public opinion is the pennant on a nation's mast which shows the politician and the editor how to trim the sails.

Austin O'Malley

#52. When I look at public opinion, I'm not far out of the mainstream. I'm in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I've ever said.

Noam Chomsky

#53. I can assure you that everyone that talks to me doesn't share my views. I seem to be a barometer of public opinion.

Cory Bernardi

#54. Public-opinion polls show that Americans split about evenly on civil unions. But when the words 'gay marriage' are presented, they break 3-to-1 against it.

Dick Morris

#55. Public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.

Sybille Bedford

#56. Learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.

Robert Greene

#57. Convention speeches are powerful tools to bend the curve of public opinion. George H. W. Bush's 1988 convention speech is a great example. His son's speech was also quite powerful.

Mark McKinnon

#58. Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits ... it is founded on morals and religion, whose authority reigns in the heart, and on the influence all these produce on public opinion before that opinion governs rulers.

Fisher Ames

#59. People have tried to corner the market on being offended, corner the market on language and corner the market on opinion. Should I lose my job 'cause I offended somebody? No, of course not. Your life should never be affected by public opinion.

Patrice O'Neal

#60. Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism,

Carl Sagan

#61. On Jackie Kennedy's historic tour of India and Pakistan in 1962, she was photographed wearing sleeveless shifts and knee-length skirts - not to mention a midriff-baring sari that caused an international sensation. Public opinion seemed to have grown more conservative in South Asia since then.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#62. As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion - and I worried about it.

William Westmoreland

#63. Spiritualism is but a baby now, an unwelcome stranger, whom public opinion, like an unnatural foster mother, tries to crush out of existence.

H. P. Blavatsky

#64. The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.

Ludwig Von Mises

#65. They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world.

Anthony Holden

#66. The Chinese government clearly does pay attention to public opinion expressed on the Internet - the extent to which they choose to adapt their practices based on it, or ignore it, seems to vary.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#67. When a large number of organs of the press come to advance along the same track, their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#68. By more than two to one Americans do not consider what Kevorkian did, injecting a terminally ill patient with legal drugs at the patient's request, to be the same as murder. You may want to note that laws are not supposed to be enforced on the basis of public opinion polls.

Dan Rather

#69. It's a sociological law that the more information you give people, the more government policy becomes dependent on public opinion.' Those were the words of Rafael Safarov,

Archie Brown

#70. The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.

Jack London

#71. In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition for social progress.

Charles William Eliot

#72. Absolute truth is not dependent upon public opinion or popularity. Now what is this truth? It is His gospel. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

#73. Public opinion is a mysterious and invisible power, to which everything must yield. There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful; yet capricious as it is, it is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just, than we imagine.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#74. They've (Israel) lost the battle for public opinion. They claim it's because American Jews know too little.. I claim it's because they know too much about the conflict, and young liberal Jews have difficulty defending the use of cluster bombs in Lebanon or supporting the Israeli settlements.

Norman Finkelstein

#75. Israel does not care about the international public opinion.

Bashar Al-Assad

#76. The court follows elite opinion, not public opinion. And Democratic leaders in Congress and Republican leaders in Congress follow elite opinion as well. It's what I've called "the Washington cartel." It's career politicians in both parties. It is lobbyists and giant corporations.

Ted Cruz

#77. The film industry has become a universal medium exercising a profound influence on the development of people's attitudes and choices, and possessing a remarkable ability to influence public opinion and culture across all social and political frontiers.

Pope John Paul II

#78. At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

#79. Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#80. Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.

Willa Cather

#81. If you make too many things too public, then you end up living your life before the court of public opinion.

Farrah Gray

#82. I remember laughing when we made those slogans up [about abortion] ... We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical.

Bernard Nathanson

#83. Public opinion actually applauds the young woman venturing into the business world, but it still obstinately (and quite illogically) protects the young man in his sacred right to know nothing of housework.

Crystal Eastman

#84. Newspapers necessarilyand inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.

Walter Lippmann

#85. It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

Bruce Jackson

#86. I think that the legitimacy of the court would be undermined in any case if the court made a decision based on its perception of public opinion.

Samuel Alito

#87. Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

Noam Chomsky

#88. Publicity is a great purifier because it sets in action the forces of public opinion, and in this country public opinion controls the courses of the nation.

Charles Evans Hughes

#89. It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.

Joseph Goebbels

#90. Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.

Abraham Lincoln

#91. Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.

Bertrand Russell

#92. Performance of one's duties should be independent of public opinion.

Mahatma Gandhi

#93. What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery - the role of the Jewish people in world politics - and their chief interest - persecution of Jews all over the world - have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.

Hannah Arendt

#94. Transactional politics requires us to be pragmatic about current realities and the state of public opinion. It's all about getting the best result possible given the circumstances here and now.

Eric Schneiderman

#95. Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

Henry A. Kissinger

#96. Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person.

William Ralph Inge

#97. You have to take risks on policy. You can't be a politician, wringing your hands, worried about what the public opinion polls are saying or worried about the negative attacks. If you believe in something, go fight for it.

Scott Pelley

#98. To serve the public interest is not the same as being a servant of public opinion.

Sidney Hook

#99. When I left America I understood the formation of public opinion in Southeast Asia. I had had the best course possible, taught by a famous Asian expert. Two minutes at Chulalongkorn taught me that I might just as profitably have studied the zither.

Carol Hollinger

#100. Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

George Washington