Top 101 Public Opinion Quotes

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

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

Convention speeches are powerful tools to bend the curve of public opinion. George H. W. Bush’s 1988 convention speech is a great example. His son’s speech was also quite powerful.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.

If a radical devolution of powers was possible, it would have been done before. The assumption of states’ rights is gone. There’s no support for it in the Supreme Court and there’s no support for it in public opinion.

If you look at the practice of ‘crisis management,’ and maybe squint at it a little, you can make out in the corners of your vision the ghosts or the vestiges of a much older, but still thoroughly American, form of public life, one centered not on public opinion but on religion.

But on the big things, I’m not going to trim in order to win public opinion. Because I really don’t want to serve in the Senate if I arrive there without permission to do the things I think need to be done.

For me, working with kids is one of my favorite ways to give back, and I refuse to let public opinion about whether I’m a ‘winner’ stop me from being a positive role model and mentor.

Stereotypes should never influence policy or public opinion.

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

Public opinion is a second conscience.

The Muslims have, as everyone else says, the right to practice their religion and they have the right to construct a mosque at ground zero if they wish. What I am saying, though, is that they should listen to public opinion, they should listen to the deep wounds and anguish that this is causing to so many good people.

Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the ten commandments.

Not merely can people like me write things that would never have been printed before but I think an enormously dramatic change has taken place in public opinion, possibly for the wrong reasons.

Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense.

American public opinion sees Arabs as terrorists and has the desert-man image about them. I wish the Americans would see Arabs and Muslims the way I see them… but Arabs are losing the public relations battle in the United States.

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

Practicing free speech on an open platform is a perilous path for any public figure, and there are no get-out-of-jail free passes in the court of public opinion.

Iran and Russia have taken specific actions to influence public opinion related to our elections.

By the start of August 1914, it was dawning on the British that a major war was about to break out on mainland Europe. Public opinion and, crucially, the cabinet was deeply divided on whether to intervene or stay out.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

I’m reading the way a lot of technology executives have decried ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘traditional media,’ and that one of the promises of ‘new media’ was that it would break the chokehold that old media companies had on public opinion.

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

Justice is not easy. It does not fit the mold of public opinion.

As far as the 2009 elections go, there has been a serious crackdown on human rights in Iran, a clampdown on the media and the wrongful imprisonment of journalists. So it seems what’s happening is the government is going after people who have a voice, people who change society or public opinion.

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.

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.

From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.

What manner of thing this ‘public opinion’ is, should be best known to those who have its name forever in their mouths and erect the regard for it into a positive article of religion. Its self-styled organ in our times is the ‘Press.’

I think on a whole host of issues Washington tends to be a lagging indicator on public 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.

I want to remind people that the Nazis weren’t able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn’t have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.

Spreading the word about depression is my mission. I am working to build awareness, educate people about the symptoms, and change public opinion and individual attitudes about depression.

With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion.

Public opinion must be heard.

With Donald J. Trump’s arrival to power, many feel astonished by the growth of populism. Others analyze with extreme care the decline of companies that measure public opinion. I am saddened to watch the lack of temperament and political stability of those who ‘represent’ a trend or ideology.

Slave narratives had their greatest influence on public opinion and on literature in the U.S. between 1830 and 1860. After Reconstruction’s defeat, their urgency of tone was replaced by the softer one of reminiscence.

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

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that’s been fed to them.

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

I don’t really believe in moral victories. You can have them when you’re dealing with public opinion, but in litigation, you want to win the case. I want to win.

While it’s very hard to know exactly how to measure public opinion there, because there’s no really good polling, the fact of the matter is that in all the polls I’ve seen the vast majority of the Iraqis prefer to be free and are pleased that the coalition freed them.

In 2017, there was a sudden recognition of several adverse societal consequences of information technology, from job losses due to automation to manipulation of public opinion, with significant political consequences.

We live in a society obsessed with public opinion. But leadership has never been about popularity.

One of the powers of a sit-in is its visibility and potential to mobilize public opinion; the way the protest is reported in the media can have a powerful influence over its eventual success or failure.

I think that the legitimacy of the court would be undermined in any case if the court made a decision based on its perception of public opinion.

Transactional politics requires us to be pragmatic about current realities and the state of public opinion. It’s all about getting the best result possible given the circumstances here and now.

It is often noted that it can be hard for democracies to fight wars because of changing public opinion.

We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.

The first to grasp how sensitive Israeli public opinion was on the issue of hostages and M.I.A.’s – and therefore what a powerful weapon abduction could be – was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The polls are just being used as another tool of voter suppression. The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you.

Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government, which sooner or later becomes autocratic government.

Public opinion is no more than this: what people think that other people think.

But being in the closet uniquely assisted me in politics. From my first run for the state legislature until my election as governor, all too often I was not leading but following my best guess at public opinion.