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Public opinion

aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population

Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views, or as a single opinion held by an individual about a social or political topic.

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. ~ John Calvin
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. ~ Edward Bernays

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · See also · External links

A

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  • The murmur of a people hath strange weight.
    • Aeschylus, Agamemnon (c. 458 BCE), translated by Gilbert Murray (1920), p. 40.
  • 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".
    • Spiro Agnew, address to the California Republican state convention, San Diego, California (September 11, 1970); Congressional Record (September 16, 1970), vol. 116, p. 32017. William Safire, then a speechwriter for President Nixon, was the author of "nattering nabobs of negativism," according to The Washingtonian (March 1985), p. 11, and The Washington Post (August 27, 1987), p. C4.
  • Public opinion is no more than this,
    What people think that other people think.
    • Alfred Austin, Prince Lucifer (London: Macmillan and Co., 1887), p. 189.

B

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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.
  • When the People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.
  • Sure 'tis an orthodox opinion,
    That grace is founded in dominion.
    • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I (1663-64), Canto III, line 1,173.

C

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  • 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.
  • Be it so that public error must have a place in human society, still, in the kingdom of God, we must look and listen only to his eternal truth, against which no series of years, no custom, no conspiracy, can plead prescription. Thus Isaiah formerly taught the people of God, "Say ye not, A confederacy, to all to whom this people shall say, A confederacy;" i.e. do not unite with the people in an impious consent.
  • Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
    • G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, Chapter VIII "The Mildness of the Yellow Press" (1905).
  • In part, again, these changes are unconscious. Public opinion is formed and expressed by machinery. The newspapers do an immense amount of thinking for the average man and woman. In fact they supply them with such a continuous stream of standardized opinion, borne along upon an equally inexhaustible flood of news and sensation, collected from every part of the world every hour of the day, that there is neither the need nor the leisure for personal reflection. All this is but a part of a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial. It produces enormous numbers of standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party. It may eventually lead to a reasonable, urbane and highly serviceable society. It may draw in its wake a mass culture enjoyed by countless millions to whom such pleasures were formerly unknown. We must not forget the enormous circulations at cheap prices of the greatest books of the world, which is a feature of modern life in civilized countries, and nowhere more than in the United States. But this great diffusion of knowledge, information and light reading of all kinds may, while it opens new pleasures to humanity and appreciably raises the general level of intelligence, be destructive of those conditions of personal stress and mental effort to which the masterpieces of the human mind are due.
  • Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature. I see that a speaker at the week-end said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.
    • Winston Churchill, speech, House of Commons (September 30, 1941); Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 (1974), vol. 6, p. 6495.

D

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

G

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J

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

K

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  • Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent.
  • The great masses, who have never been, in the history of mankind, more subject to hypnotic suggestion than they are right now, have become the puppets of the “public opinion” that is engineered by the newspapers in the service, it need hardly be emphasized, of the reigning powers of finance. What is printed in the morning editions of the big city newspapers is the opinion of nine out of ten readers by nightfall. The United States of America, whose more rapid “progress” enables us to predict the future on a daily basis, has pulled far ahead of the pack when it comes to standardizing thought, work, entertainment, etc.
    • Ludwig Klages, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, p. 408, as translated by Joseph Pryce

L

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  • In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.
    • Abraham Lincoln, reply in the first debate with Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Ottawa, Illinois (August 21, 1858); in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 3, p. 27.

M

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  • 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.

O

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  • 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.

P

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S

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  • Great religious leaders are more interesting and more important subjects for the dramatist than great conquerors. It is a misfortune that public opinion would not tolerate a dramatization of Mahomet in Constantinople. But to prohibit it here, where public opinion would tolerate it, is an absurdity which, if applied in all directions, would make it impossible for the Queen to receive a Turkish ambassador without veiling herself, or the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's to display a cross on the summit of their Cathedral in a city occupied largely and influentially by Jews.
  • Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions.
    • Leo Strauss, “What is liberal education,” Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 8.
  • 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.
    • Jan Struther, "The Weather of the World", A Pocketful of Pebbles (1946), p. 341.
  • What news? Ma foi!
    The tiger has broken out of his den.
    The monster was three days at sea.
    The wretch has landed at Fréjus.
    The Brigand has arrived at Antibes.
    The Invader has reached Grenoble.
    The General has entered Lyons.
    Napoleon slept last night at Fontainebleau.
    The Emperor proceeds to the Tuileries to-day.
    His Imperial Majesty will address his loyal subjects to-morrow.
    • Author unknown; reported in Louis Cohen, Napoleonic Anecdotes (1925), p. 229. Taken from a skit of 1815, this purports to show how Napoleon's return from Elba was progressively regarded in Paris.

T

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  • No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen's unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aerial navigation; but a change in public opinion. And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.
    • Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Christianity, Ch. 17 (1896).
  • 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.
    • Mark Twain, Europe and Elsewhere. Corn Pone Opinions (1925).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 569-70.
  • Je connais quelqu'un qui a plus d'esprit que Napoléon, que Voltaire, que tous les ministres présents et futurs: c'est l'opinion.
    • I know where there is more wisdom than is found in Napoleon, Voltaire, or all the ministers present and to come—in public opinion.
    • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, in the Chamber of Peers (1821).

See also

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