All we have and are is based on the Christian faith, which has shaped law, government, morals, music, landscape, and education here for a thousand years.
In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue, and thought to have real effects, they must advocate the message that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live.
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.
The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors and our vigilance are supposed to shape our country.
Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.
He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.
Women's particular experiences continue to shape not just their points of view but their actions, in the United States and around the world.
I think personal beliefs of everybody shape everybody.
The world has progressed to the point where it's most powerful force is public opinion. And I believe that in this world it is not the great book or epic play, as once was the case, that will shape that opinion, but those who understand mass media and the techniques of mass persuasion...We must not just believe in what we sell. We must sell what we believe in. And we must pour a vast energy into those causes.
Give me the writing of a nation's advertising and propaganda, and I care not who governs its politics.
We need to put into practice the idea of embracing other cultures. We need to be shaping the kind of world we want to live in instead of waiting for someone else or some other entities to do it for us.
The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery.
Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long periods of time in the form of legislation and customs.
The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel—these undisputedly are the great molders of public opinion and public morals to-day.
Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation.
