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Public Opinion Quotes

Browse 464 quotes about Public Opinion.

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Public Opinion Quotes

“Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.”

PeopleFactsArtistOpinionPrinciplesBreakAudienceDemocracyDemocraticVicesAcceptedTyrannyJournalistDependentRegimesFlatteryPublic OpinionLegitimacyIncapacity
Book:Closing of the American Mind
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“Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great.”

MenHeartKindDoeEnoughAgeOpinionHe ManEssenceAccomplishAll KindsGreat MenGossipDespisePublic OpinionFalsity
Book:Hegel's Philosophy of right
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“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.”

PersonsMomentsIndividualViewsNumbersFictionOpinionGoneGroupsSpecialUpliftingNeverthelessMultitudesUnitsPublic OpinionPhantomsTransientIllusory
Author:Karl Jaspers
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“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!”

MayPoliticalUsedResultsOpinionPlansShapesStrategyMarketingCampaignsTemptationJustifyWord Of GodCommandmentsPublic OpinionPollsDisobediencePrioritizeMarketing StrategyInformativeObedience To GodPolitical CampaignOpinion Polls
Author:Russell M. Nelson
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“Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child -- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.”

IfsWayGivingChildrenLittlesStatesMightWould BeCareLawParentResultsRaceOpinionOughtHealthyPaidVery GoodMedicalGenuineEducatedTheeReasonablePublic OpinionCertificatesHaphazardHealthy Children
Book:The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The private years, 1884-1914
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“The world has progressed to the point where it's most powerful force is public opinion. And I believe that in this world it is not the great book or epic play, as once was the case, that will shape that opinion, but those who understand mass media and the techniques of mass persuasion...We must not just believe in what we sell. We must sell what we believe in. And we must pour a vast energy into those causes.”

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Author:William Bernbach
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“Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it. A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial influences which are at its disposal. The unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the thoughts and the hearer's receptiveness of new truth.”

MenWayMindIdeasIndividualNaturalNumbersOpinionInfluenceCivilizationGoldOrganizationIndependentPressesFinancialCrowdsPropagandaToneRelyOppositionPublic OpinionUnnaturalRevive
Author:Albert Schweitzer
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“When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”

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Author:Frederic Bastiat
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“The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration?”

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Book:The Teaching of Reverence for Life
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“It is a mournful fact that most men, and indeed all men of worldly character, have so much regard to public opinion that they dare not act according to the dictates of their consciences when acting thus would incur the popular frown.”

MenCharacterFactsActingOpinionConscienceRegardDareDenialWorldlyPublic OpinionSelf-denial
Book:Lectures on systematic theology, embracing moral government, the atonement, etc. Revised, enlarged, and partly re-written by the Author ... Edited ... by G. Redford
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“There is no use in deceiving ourselves. American public opinion rejects the market economy, the capitalistic free enterprise system that provided the nation with the highest standard of living ever attained. Full government control of all activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties.”

UseGovernmentIndividualNationsGoalPartyOpinionEconomyActivityHighestStandardsLibertarianEnterpriseRejectsDeceivingPublic OpinionStandards Of LivingFree EnterpriseMarket EconomyDeceiving Ourselves
Book:Economic freedom and interventionism: an anthology of articles and essays
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“No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.”

PeopleMindBelievePersonsMadeIdeasVoiceLeaderOpinionWiseGroupsDivineSeriousPrejudiceSymbolsManipulationFormulasPublic OpinionLoftySociologists
Author:Edward Bernays
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“Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through the press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls [are] a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind.”

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Author:Joost Meerloo
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“We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in comparison with the mass of the lukewarm and the misguided. And those who have an interest in keeping the machinery of war going are a very powerful body; they will stop at nothing to make public opinion subservient to their murderous ends.”

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Book:Ideas and Opinions
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“There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women. These should therefore be our chief study; we should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal, without knowing that they do so; for they will only be indulging their own desire of personal admiration.”

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Author:Adam Weishaupt
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