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.
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First debate with Stephen Douglas Ottawa, Illinois, (21 August 1858).Abraham Lincoln
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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 B. Hayes
In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.
Stendhal
Warren is considered a dangerous and subversive character. He is an apparent sympathizer with the Communist Party and has rendered numerous decisions favorable to it. ... Warren is a rabid agitator for compulsory racial mongrelization and has handed down various decisions compelling whites to mix with negroes in the schools, in public housing, in restaurants and in public bathing facilities. He is known to work closely with the N.A.A.C.P. and favors the use of force and coercion to compel white school children to mingle intimately with negroes.
Earl Warren
Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? And does not the slave system, by denying the slave all legal right of testimony, make every individual owner an irresponsible despot? Can anybody fall to make the inference what the practical result will be? If there is, as we admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity, is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian, the brutal and debased? And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest? Are the honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority anywhere in this world?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Like a hawk about to devour its prey, the wings of public opinion hover above the head of the judge. All the Court’s decisions are disguised and indirect forms of pleading at the bar of public opinion.
Malcolm de Chazal
Lincoln, Abraham
Lindbergh, Anne Morrow
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