Famous quotes containing the words public opinion polls, public opinion, public, opinion and/or polls:
“The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Constitutional statutes ... which embody the settled public opinion of the people who enacted them and whom they are to govern—can always be enforced. But if they embody only the sentiments of a bare majority, pronounced under the influence of a temporary excitement, they will, if strenuously opposed, always fail of their object; nay, they are likely to injure the cause they are framed to advance.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)