“Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.”

— Moses I. Finley

Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 1, Leaders and Followers, p. 3

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Moses I. Finley 17

American historian 1912–1986

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Source: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), p. 15

“They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

On the Greeks, in Ch. 1
The Greek Way (1930)

“Tradition is a prison with majority opinion the modern jailer.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 108

“Free government is government by public opinion. Upon the soundness and integrity of public opinion depends the destiny of our democracy.”

Robert M. La Follette Sr. (1855–1925) American politician

"Fooling the People as a Fine Art", La Follette's Magazine (April 1918)

“The first major discovery of prehistoric art was the Spanish cave of Altamira, which, like Lascaux, is one of the most spectacular examples of Upper Paleolithic art yet known.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

“It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Ottoline Morrell, January 30, 1916
1910s

“Liberal democracy has been one of the sturdiest political systems in the history of the modern West. As the dominant modern form of democracy, it has informed and guided several of the most successful and enduring governments the world has known, not least among them that of the United States.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age (2003), p. 3

“Amid the vast modern network of universities, corporate laboratories, and national science foundations has arisen an awareness that the best financed and best organized of research enterprises have not learned to engender, perhaps not even to recognize, world-tuning originality.”

James Gleick book Genius

James Gleick (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Vintage Books

“We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligencia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligencia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins on militant atheism http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html, (February 2002)

“The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be, liberty.”

Fisher Ames (1758–1808) American politician

The Dangers of American Liberty (1805), in [Ames, Fisher, and Seth Ames, Works of Fisher Ames: with a selection from his speeches and correspondence, 1854, Little, Brown, 349, Boston, http://books.google.com/books?id=fjoOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA349&vq=known+propensity]

“Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.”

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Moses I. Finley 17

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