public consensus Quotes

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Any law that takes hold of a mans daily life cannot prevail in a community, unless the vast majority of the community are actively in favor of it. The laws that are the most operative are the laws which protect life.

Yet the effort to inform the public also encouraged responsible public discussion that succeeded in developing a consensus for the measured approach that many scientists supported.

I am very anxious to please the public, particularly as it lives and lets live.

I guess I'm interested in people and society and what we do collectively in the realm of decisions that shape our world. You know, at least on a human level.

We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.

To please the many is to displease the wise.

President tends to feel that he cannot go beyond what the public will support him in doing. So he tries not to decide what is the best course so much as to decide what the people will support.

The key to any successful plan is buy-in from the public, and what this process has demonstrated is the importance of including citizens in formulating a consensus plan that preserves our beautiful refuge.

In the polls, over 80% support the right to die and have done for the last 25 years. Even 80% of practising Catholics and Protestants support it, plus 76% of Church Times readers.

The oil industry has outpaced the building of a public consensus of the implications of climate science.

A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?

Only basic agreement on the major objectives of the state can provide a society with a firm basis for democracy.

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit. We should not listen to those who like to affirm that the voice of the people is the voice of God, for the tumult of the masses is truly close to madness.

Opinions are the cheapest commodities on earth. Everyone has a flock of opinions ready to be wished upon anyone who will accept them. If you are influenced by "opinions" when you reach DECISIONS, you will not succeed in any undertaking.

The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.

The effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

Very hard, very hard to represent a country, or carry out a policy that does not have consensus support.

A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave

The people of America are in agreement in defending their liberties at any cost, and the first line of that defense lies in the protection of economic security.

Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.

It's in no way my interest (according to the common acceptance of that word) to convince the world of their errors; that is, I shall get nothing from it but the private satisfaction of having done good to mankind, and I know nobody that reckons that satisfaction any part of their interest.

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.