A Quote by Walter Lippmann

Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

Walter Lippmann

Quote Topics

Democracy Important Left Much Opinion Public Public Opinion Too

Quote Author

Walter Lippmann
American - Journalist
September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974

There are many issues, as everyone knows, in the United States on which public opinion leans very much to the left of elite policy, but that's because public opinion hasn't been turned into a political force.

Norman Finkelstein

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

There's no question that public opinion is changing, and if you're a person of the left, your goal is presumably to try to mobilize public opinion to affect elite policy; and I think now there are unusual, unprecedented opportunities to do so.

Norman Finkelstein

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

Democracy is too important to be left to politicians.

Elizabeth May

I think polling is important because it gives a voice to the people. It gives a quantitative, independent assessment of what the public feels as opposed to what experts or pundits think the public feels. So often it provides a quick corrective on what's thought to be the conventional wisdom about public opinion. There are any number of examples that I could give you about how wrong the experts are here in Washington, in New York and elsewhere about public opinion that are revealed by public opinion polls.

Andrew Kohut

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Farrah Gray

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

Jann Wenner

But the doctors in the past, as the review of the evidence showed, branded Jenner, Semmelweis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Pasteur, Lister, Koch and Keen as charlatans...Napoleon said that war is too important to be left to the generals. We go on the assumption in the Senate that foreign relations are too important to be left to the diplomats...this question (on a novel cancer cure) is too important to leave purely to doctors.

Paul Douglas

The only force at the disposal of democracy is that of public opinion.

Mahatma Gandhi

Any politician in a democracy has to be mindful of public opinion.

Douglas Alexander

Unions say, 'Education of the children is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market.' The opposite is true. Education is too important to be left to the calcified union/government monopoly.

John Stossel

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.

Abraham Lincoln

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.