“The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how people think. The interrogative process is very distinctly weighted against the asking of an intelligent question or the recording of a thoughtful answer.”

—  Christopher Hitchens

"Voting in the Passive Voice" (1992).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The polls undoubtedly help to decide what people think, but their most important long-term influence may be on how peop…" by Christopher Hitchens?
Christopher Hitchens photo
Christopher Hitchens305
British American author and journalist 1949–2011

Related quotes

Cory Doctorow photo

“It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”

Cory Doctorow book For the Win

Source: For the Win

Paul McCartney photo

“We're constantly being asked all sorts of very profound questions. But we're not very profound people. People say, 'What do you think of the H-bomb, of religion, of fan worship?' But we didn't really start thinking about these things until people asked us. And even then we didn't get much time to consider them. What do I think of the H-bomb? Well, here's an answer with the full weight of five O levels and one A level behind it: I don't agree with it.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 109

“Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if you take a day off.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Andy Andrews photo

“Most people think it takes a long time to change. It doesn’t. Change is immediate! Instantaneous! It may take a long time to decide to change…but change happens in a heartbeat!”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Source: The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective

“Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

“An analysis of the concept of mind is an important philosophical issue, but the analysis cannot be reduced to programming of physiological terms… [It remarks the importance of the question] the way people think and the way computers can simulate thinking.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Source: Conceptual Structures, 1984, p. 359 cited in: Rajiv Kishore, Ram Ramesh (2006) Ontologies: A Handbook of Principles, Concepts and Applications in Information Systems. p. 300

Eric Schmidt photo

“I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Eric Schmidt (1955) software engineer, businessman

The Wall Street Journal (August 14, 2010) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.html.

Barack Obama photo

“And I think the question that the people of Jamaica, just like the people of the United States and everywhere else, should be asking is: If the government is spending money right now, is it on something that is going to help create long-term growth and help people succeed? If the answer is no, you shouldn’t spend that money. Spending money just for the sake of spending money is not -- that’s not the formula for success. But if the money is being spent on what we talked about -- early childhood education; if it’s being spent on infrastructure; if it’s being spent on research; if it’s being spent on building skills for workers -- those are good investments.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Town Hall meeting with Young Leaders of the Americas (April 2015)

“We often take for granted the terms, the premises, and the methods that prevail in our time and place. We take for granted, as the starting points for our own thinking, the outcomes of a process of thinking by our predecessors. … New questions are built from the answers that were given to the old questions, but the old questions are now no longer asked. Foundations get covered up by what is built upon them.”

Harvey Flaumenhaft (1938) American writer

Preface to Masterworks of Discovery series (2011)

Stephen Hawking photo

“I think that it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

As quoted in "Return of the time lord" in The Guardian (27 September 2005)

Related topics