A Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King
Government, in the last analysis, is organized opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government.
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Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government, which sooner or later becomes autocratic government.
Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.
[We are] no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.
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.
Government is being founded on opinion, the opinion of the public, even when it is wrong, ought to be respected to a certain degree.
If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can?t win many elections after a famine, and you don?t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.
Think you have a low opinion of government? You should see government's opinion of you!
Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force.
We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.
Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
Politicians know that as public opinion learns to assert itself more aggressively, a government that goes against a presidential opinion can find itself on the defensive.
The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed.
Public opinion is the last refuge of a politician without any opinion.
You cannot choose between party government and Parliamentary government. I say, you can have no Parliamentary government if you have no party government; and, therefore, when gentlemen denounce party government, they strike at the scheme of government which, in my opinion, has made this country great, and which I hope will keep it great.
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.
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.
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