Saad Hariri Quotes

Any person should have enough sense to know that a PM should have public support. Numbers should be with them.

Well, there are other aspects, I still command very good support in the party.

To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them.

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

No minister ever stood, or could stand, against public opinion.

You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn't have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.

Towering over Presidents and State Governors, over Congress and State Legislatures, over conventions and the vast machinery of party, public opinion stands out in the United States, as the great source of Power.

Whether this organization [the Chinese Communist Party] has strength depends not on whether it is in power, but on whether it has the best people, and whether it can earn the support of the people.

Roosevelt knew never to lose control of the majority of American opinion, unlike his greatest democratic contemporaries, Churchill and De Gaulle, who at times suffered spectacular rejections by their electorates.

The social power of the Presidency is one of the most powerful tools a President can use.

I never had a political power base.

Politicians around the world are very different, but they all have one thing in common: The first thing they respond to is public opinion.

Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.

One of the things that you learn, having been in this [President's] office for four years, is the old adage of Abraham Lincoln's. That with public opinion there's nothing you can't do and without public opinion there's very little you can get done.

I know of no better or safer human tribunal than the people.

We are the majority of the thinkers of the country.

Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death.

The world is governed by opinions.

Public opinion has become the public law

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours' publicity.

Public opinion is the most potent monarch this world knows.

In Russia, as well as everywhere else, the true and lasting power is that of public opinion, and of those who know how to influence it.

You don't determine what is good policy by polling.

In politics if the people give you popularity, the other politicians observe and give you power.