Polls Quotes

“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom.

...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.”
― Peggy Noonan, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now

“In most polls there are always about 5 percent of the people who 'don't know.' What isn't generally understood is that it's the same people in every poll.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well. We have to do what great thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes were already advocating 100 years ago: to “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.” We have to direct our minds to the future. To stop consuming our own discontent through polls and the relentlessly bad news media. To consider alternatives and form new collectives. To transcend this confining zeitgeist and recognize our shared idealism.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

“Talk is cheap, voting is free; take it to the polls...”
― Nanette L. Avery

“Important decisions that will affect a nation’s fate or humanity’s fate cannot be left to the referendums! Because such decisions require good knowledge of history; they require a sound reason and a powerful logic and masses often do not have such characteristics!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“There were four white cops in the polling place where I went to vote. Right in the middle of Harlem, four white cops. Everybody else there were colored, voters all colored, officials all colored registering the books, only the cops white--to remind me of which color is the law. I went inside that voting booth and shut the door and stood there all by myself and put the biggest black mark I could make in front of every black name on the ballot. At least up North I can vote black. If enough of us votes black in Harlem, maybe someday we can change the color of the law.”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

“The large office had been deliberately designed so that the two sub-terranian levels were just the tiniest bit smaller, so that the building was proudly 51% conducting honest and open business, and only 49% not. Inkle and Kelvin had felt a boost of confidence from their manufactured technicality, similar to the comfort that survey results can provide when carefully polling groups more likely to give you comforting numbers.”
― Mandy Ashcraft, Small Orange Fruit

“From the president down to the man in the street, we are intellectually weak and vulnerable to propaganda. We tend toward the shortened version - and we attend it with little understanding. Even when enemy propaganda fails to nudge us in the wrong direction, our ignorance nonetheless leads us away from the proper course. No longer capable of a serious discussion, and apparently no longer interested, we remain focused on polls and simplistic theories and media sound bites.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“The suicide bombings, as every poll among Palestinians has shown, were, and remain, immensely popular.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict