Top 1200 Public Opinion Quotes & Sayings

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

You can't forge a new sort of consensus, you can't forge public opinion, by following public opinion.

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.

Don't talk to me about appealing to the public. I am done with the public, for the present anyway. The public reads the headlines and that is all. The story itself is fair and shows the facts. That would be all right if the public read the facts. But it does not. It reads the headlines and listens to the demagogues and that's the stuff public opinion is made of.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

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

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.

Active liberty is particularly at risk when law restricts speech directly related to the shaping of public opinion, for example, speech that takes place in areas related to politics and policy-making by elected officials. That special risk justifies especially strong pro-speech judicial presumptions. It also justifies careful review whenever the speech in question seeks to shape public opinion, particularly if that opinion in turn will affect the political process and the kind of society in which we live.

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.

Because the task of a political leader is to do what he believes is better for his country. Sometimes the public opinion is in favor; sometimes the public opinion needs a little bit more time to understand things.

The court follows elite opinion, not public opinion. And Democratic leaders in Congress and Republican leaders in Congress follow elite opinion as well. It's what I've called "the Washington cartel." It's career politicians in both parties. It is lobbyists and giant corporations.

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.

All Governments rest mainly on public opinion, and to that of his own subjects every wise Sovereign will look. The opinion of his subjects will force a Sovereign to do his duty, and by that opinion will he be exalted or depressed in the politics of the world.

One of the things that you learn, having been in this [President's] office for four years, is the old adage of Abraham Lincoln's. That with public opinion there's nothing you can't do and without public opinion there's very little you can get done.

Public opinion is the last refuge of a politician without any opinion.

the heaviest restriction upon the freedom of public opinion is not the official censorship of the Press, but the unofficial censorship by a Press which exists not so much to express opinion as to manufacture it.

American public opinion, as you can see in the polls, radically changed from being against airstrikes to being heavily in favor that [President Obama] decided to do airstrikes. This is a classic example of leading from behind where he waits for public opinion. And now it's the public who's demanding he do something.

Publicity is a great purifier because it sets in action the forces of public opinion, and in this country public opinion controls the courses of the nation

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

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.

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.

But there was no room at the inn"; the inn is the gathering place of public opinion; so often public opinion locks its doors to the King.

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.

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

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.

I believe if a private citizen is able to affect public opinion in a constructive way he doesn't have to be an elected public servant to perform a public service.

To serve the public interest is not the same as being a servant of public opinion.

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

I believe if a private citizen is able to affect public opinion in a constructive way, he doesn't have to be an elected public servant to perform a public service.

We were very effective, and I was very effective, in shaping public opinion around my campaigns. But there were big stretches, while governing, where even though we were doing the right thing, we weren't able to mobilize public opinion firmly enough behind us to weaken the resolve of the Republicans to stop opposing us or to cooperate with us. And there were times during my presidency where I lost the PR battle.

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

Government is being founded on opinion, the opinion of the public, even when it is wrong, ought to be respected to a certain degree.

What we call public opinion is generally public sentiment.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

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.

As a public official, when I take a position, I stand up to explain and defend it. I file annual financial disclosures, campaign finance reports, and have to face the scrutiny of public opinion.

In the long run, much public opinion is made in the universities; ideas generated there filter down through the teaching profession and the students into the general public.

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.

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.

Publicity is a great purifier because it sets in action the forces of public opinion, and in this country public opinion controls the courses of the nation.

Welsh rugby has done its dirty washing in public. It's nothing new. We're a tribal bunch. If warring parties want to sway public opinion, they do it in the public arena.

And I like to convey my feelings, my emotions, my experience, the information I have to public use, public opinion.

Government, in the last analysis, is organized opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government.

I realize that my opinion is my opinion, not everybody has to believe it and I never tried to shove anything down anyone's throat, but I was willing to take that to the trenches if you know what I mean. I took that opinion to the wall, often in public, often had to... I often had to fight in public with the very same people who I was trying to convince to play my records!

It's not about preferring someone, it's about whose ideas are more close to you and whose ideas are more welcomed in Russian public opinion. Let's not forget about public opinion in our country. It's very influential and it's very powerful.

An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion.

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!

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

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

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.

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.

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.

Public opinion shapes public policy dramatically.