Public opinion Quotes

“The murmur of a people hath strange weight.”

“A public opinion poll will not get you rich on Wall Street.”

“Sure 'tis an orthodox opinion,
That grace is founded in dominion.”

“When the People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.”

“Public opinion is no more than this,
What people think that other people think.”

“Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.”

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

“Wikipedia: Public opinion”

“I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man—public opinion.”

“In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”

“Je connais quelqu'un qui a plus d'esprit que Napoléon, que Voltaire, que tous les ministres présents et futurs: c'est l'opinion.”

“Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fears. It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.”

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4–H Club—the "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history".”

“Human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error.”

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy, is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority. [...] Evidently we have not advanced very far from the condition that confronted Wendell Phillips. Today, as then, public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant.”

“The practice of democracy has the notorious tendency to become paradoxical. It begins in the name of the "demos" but goes on to construct the demos rather narrowly; oftentimes, sections of the population manage to ensconce themselves as "the people", they count as the public, their ideas masquerade as the people's ideas.”