A Quote by Richard Brookhiser
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.
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Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.
Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called "public" or "popular" opinion.
Their preservation depends upon a sentiment. As sentiment never yet annihilated a paying industry, we cannot hope to stay, wholly, the ax and saw of the lumberman. But popular opinion, combined with action, if directed intelligently towards the setting apart of some one section of the noble redwood forests... will, I believe, save for our present delight and for that of the generations who come after us, at least one grand forest of the Sequoia sempervirens such as the world cannot show elsewhere, such as a thousand years cannot reproduce.
I think polling is the best way of gauging public opinion - doing something that's independent, that's quantitative, that doesn't give just the loud voices about how things are going; or doesn't give so called experts the notion that they know what public opinion is. I think that's what makes public opinion polling pretty important. Qualitative assessments of public opinion; going out and talking to people and understanding the nuance to what's behind the numbers. I think it's awfully important as well.
Party action should follow, not precede the creation of a dominant popular sentiment.
You should turn around at the end of the day and say I really like that piece of work, or that piece of work sucked. Not, was that popular or wasn't it popular?
Basketball should be more popular. In my opinion, the NBA should rival the NFL. At the very least, no way should the NFL be five times more popular than the NBA.
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.
I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program.
That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.
The temptation to be popular may prioritize public opinion above the word of God. Political campaigns and marketing strategies widely employ public opinion polls to shape their plans. Results of those polls are informative. But they could hardly be used as grounds to justify disobedience to God’s commandments!
It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears.
REFERENDUM, n. A law for submission of proposed legislation to a popular vote to learn the nonsensus of public opinion.
I wanted to unite the popular and the serious, and to make a popular symphony, a popular oratorio.
My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.
I don't hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by the tabloids or popular opinion. I don't like bourgeois values. I say you find your own way to live.
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