A Quote by Samuel Smiles

The tiniest bits of opinion sown in the minds of children in private life afterwards issue forth to the world, and become its public opinion; for nations are gathered out of nurseries.

Samuel Smiles

Quote Topics

Afterwards Become Bits Children Forth Issue Life Minds Nations Opinion Out Private Private Life Public Public Opinion World

Quote Author

Samuel Smiles
Scottish - Author
December 23, 1812 - April 16, 1904

Private opinion creates public opinion. Public opinion overflows eventually into national behavior as things are arranged at present, can make or mar the world. That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.

Jan Struther

Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Nowadays public opinion is not the sum of private opinions. On the contrary, private opinions are an echo of public opinion

Nicolas Gomez Davila

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

Henry David Thoreau

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

Henry Ward Beecher

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.

Andrew Kohut

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

Thomas Hobbes

From the same it proceedeth,that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler

Thomas Hobbes

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

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as 'public opinion,' a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; "'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy.

Karl Jaspers

All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion ; and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life.

James Russell Lowell

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

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