Public Opinion Quotes - Page 7

• Society,--the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world's university, at once a school and a theater, the spur and the crown of ambition, the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit, the power that gives government leave to be, and outruns the lazy Church in fixing the moral sense of the eye.

  Wendell Phillips

  Sex, Real, School

  Wendell Phillips (1864). “Speeches, Lectures, and Letters”, p.244

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• The soldier's business is to take life. For that he is paid by the State, eulogized by political charlatans and upheld by public hysteria. But woman's function is to give life, yet neither the State nor politicians nor public opinion have ever made the slightest provision in return for the life woman has given.

  Emma Goldman

  Hysteria, Giving, Political

  Emma Goldman (2016). “Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1926”, p.102, PM Press

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• 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

  Hero, Government, Justice

  Martha Gellhorn (2015). “The View From The Ground”, p.400, Granta Books

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• Fashion is not public opinion, or the result of embodiment of public opinion. It may be that public opinion will condemn the shape of a bonnet, as it may venture to do always, and with the certainty of being right nine times in ten: but fashion will place it upon the head of every woman in America; and, were it literally a crown of thorns, she would smile contentedly beneath the imposition.

  J. G. Holland

  Fashion, America, Crowns

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• This is God's standards [against same-sex marriage and abortions]. And just because public opinion may have changed or somebody takes a poll - this is just one of the issues. And it doesn't matter what people say or what people think. It doesn't matter about the opinion polls. It's what God says, and God says this is a sin. And it's a sin against him, and he's going to judge sin.

  Franklin Graham

  Sex, Thinking, Issues

  Source: www.npr.org

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• 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

  Views, Share, Barometer

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• There can be no complete and permanent reform of the civil service until public opinion emancipates congressmen from all control and influence over government patronage. Legislation is required to establish the reform. No proper legislation is to be expected as long as members of Congress are engaged in procuring offices for their constituents.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Government, Long, Office

  Diary entry. "Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States". Book edited by Charles Richard Williams, The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, February 14, 1879.

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• Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics.

  George F. Kennan

  Opinion, Force, Jungle

  George F. Kennan (2012). “American Diplomacy: Sixtieth-Anniversary Expanded Edition”, p.66, University of Chicago Press

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• I have looked at public opinion polls in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the height of Marshall Plan aid. They had a very negative attitude towards the United States then. There were negative attitudes towards the United States because of Vietnam. There were negative attitudes about the United States when Reagan wanted to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles. I don't think the president should base his foreign policy on American public opinion polls, let alone foreign public opinion polls.

  John Bolton

  Attitude, Thinking, President

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Public opinion's always in advance of the law.

  John Galsworthy

  Law, Opinion

  John Galsworthy (2009). “25 Plays”, p.478, Wildside Press LLC

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• Whether we're talking about what the role of the government is, what you think of the United Nations, political leaders or how to respond to [Hurricane] Katrina and whether it had anything to do with race, across a wide variety of issues we see differences between mainstream black and white American opinion that dwarfs anything in American public opinion, period. Democrat versus Republican, men versus women, conservative versus liberal, the black/white divide is the biggest, one of the biggest in the world, and certainly the largest gap in the United States.

  Michael C Dawson

  Black And White, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The sham engineers of the music industry, who steer the wheels of public opinion, are driving the good features of calypso into the ground. I shudder to think what these greedy men will eventually do to this true art form.

  Harry Belafonte

  Art, Men, Thinking

  New Musical Express Magazine, May 1957.

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• 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

  Government, People, Feelings

  John Stuart Mill (1861). “Considerations on Representative Government”, p.296

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• It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter.

  Bertrand Russell

  Children, Law, Matter

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Autobiography”, p.270, Routledge

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• In a democratic society, as Max Weber said, what is possible is only possible because some people have demanded the impossible. The abolitionists helped to create a public discourse in which men like Lincoln become possible. That doesn't mean Lincoln is an abolitionist. It means there is a public opinion out there which is being influenced by antislavery sentiment.

  Eric Foner

  Mean, Men, People

  "Eric Foner on the Perennial Relevance of Abraham Lincoln". Interview with Aaron Leonard, historynewsnetwork.org. October 4, 2010.

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• With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable. They have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.

  James Madison

  Taken, Roots, Excess

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• The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.

  Anatole France

  Military, Heaven, Kingdoms

  Anatole France (2016). “The Revolt of the Angels”, p.36, Xist Publishing

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• If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, this is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mean, Men, Lazy

  "Untimely Meditations". "Schopenhauer as educator," § 3.1, p. 128. Book by Friedrich Nietzsche (1876), translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 1983.

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• I have always tried to be obedient regarding important matters like not being scalded to death by burning oil, but when public opinion takes a route far from one's inner conviction, one cannot value disobedience too highly.

  Barbara Dana

  Oil, Important, Burning

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• Looking at polls of Arab public opinion, you look at popular figures, the most popular figure is the prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, and then it goes down the list. You get Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, you don't get Obama, or in fact any western leader. The public doesn't want the whole imperial project. So if you had democracy, it would be all over.

  Noam Chomsky

  Turkeys, Leader, Democracy

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• There are by now declassified documents from the 1950s that tells you a lot about what's going on in Egypt and we should have known it then. It's about exactly what's happening, how we can disregard public opinion as long as the dictators we support are capable of suppressing their populations. So to hell with public opinion. That's all right there in the 1950's. That's not security. That's not security of the government. That's, if anything, security from its own population. And there's a lot of that.

  Noam Chomsky

  Egypt, Should Have, Government

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• Only the truth and its expression can establish that new public opinion which will reform the ancient obsolete and pernicious order of life; and yet we not only do not express the truth we know, but often even distinctly give expression to what we ourselves regard as false. If only free men would not rely on that which has no power, and is always fettered upon external aids; but would trust in that which is always powerful and free the truth and its expression!

  Leo Tolstoy

  Powerful, Men, Expression

  graf Leo Tolstoy (1913). “Essays, letters, misc. (General articles ; Famine articles ; The Dukhobors)”

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

  Walter Lippmann

  Organization, Newspapers, Defective

  1922 Public Opinion, ch.1.

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• I do think the whole question of judicial accountability is a complicated one. On the one hand, you want to encourage judicial independence. And it's always, I think, problematic when an unpopular decision triggers a recall election. Because it sends a disempowering message to judges. On the other hand, it's the only way that voters have to rein in someone whose views are really so out of the mainstream of public opinion that they jeopardize the legitimacy of the judicial process.

  Deborah Rhode

  Thinking, Views, Hands

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

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• All satyagraha and fasting is a species of tyaga. It depends for its effects upon an expression of wholesome public opinion shorn of all bitterness.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Expression, Fasting, Bitterness

  Mahatma Gandhi (1941). “The Indian States' Problem”

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