#public opinion

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

— J. B. Priestley

#digging #garden #growing #how #like

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. ↗

— Samuel Alito

#based #case #court #decision #i

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. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#generated #incapable #into #irresponsible #judging

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence. ↗

— Walter Lippmann

#beset #citizen #compliment #evidence #good

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny. ↗

— James F. Cooper

#democracies #exhibit #form #law #masses

The Reform Bill has destroyed the ancient conduits and strainers, and brings Public Opinion to act upon the government with the rapid, turbulent, and uncertain violence of a flood! ↗

— Robert Peel

#ancient #bill #brings #destroyed #flood

There is a power in public opinion in this country - and I thank God for it: for it is the most honest and best of all powers - which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens. ↗

— Martin Van Buren

#country #fortunes #god #hands #his

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact. ↗

— Alfred de Vigny

#author #composition #double #fact #hand

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. ↗

— James Q. Wilson

#been #before #court #done #gone

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don't see why anybody does. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#any #anybody #believe #claims #does