Robert McChesney Quotes

… moral ideas are not fixed. The attitude of public opinion towards slavery was completely changed in twenty or thirty years.

People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.

The biggest challenge is how to affect public attitudes and make people care.

Even with, or perhaps, because of, this background, I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.

Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.

Things are changing so rapidly, it’s going to be a political liability in the near term for an individual to say “I oppose gay marriage.” Mark my words.

There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.

No law however formal can withstand the effect of changes in opinion.

The great work which is to be done is to change public opinion.

If we're going to affect policy, or affect attitudes, for me, the adults have always been the target population.

Culturally, it's very hard to change people's attitudes about public space.

Public opinion in the United States has shifted significantly, not just outside but also within the Jewish community.

Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing

America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time.

One should be weary of drawing too many inferences from a single poll. You can find wildly disparate results with two different polls. There is no question that American Muslims remain one of the most marginalized and demonized groups in United States. There has been a sustained propaganda campaign against Muslims for over a decade and it doesn't disappear over night. Those attitudes are hardened. But one of the things that polling often doesn't measure is the intensity of opinions.

In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.

More people more accepting of civil unions and gay marriage, which our pollster said was the most significant change they've seen on any social issue. So, this country is changing in a way.

[John's Adams] description of [Benjamin] Franklin in a letter to [his wife] Abigail in 1775 is laudatory. Only when he experiences all the adulation paid to Franklin in Paris does he begin to change his tune.

What happened in the following years? Well, I think that among the educated classes it stayed the same. You talk about humanitarian intervention, it's like Vietnam was a humanitarian intervention. Among the public, it's quite different.

Change has no constituency and a perceived revolution has even less.

Since [violence against women] is rooted in discrimination, impunity and complacency, we need to change attitudes and behavior - and we need to change laws and make sure they are enforced just like you are doing in Cuba.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

The attitudes towards mental health must change

I haven't changed - the public has. I'm an insider now, which is hilarious.

When you watch CNN and they're giving you news based on tweets that people are sending out, you realize that society is really changing. The collective public have a really big voice that they didn't previously have, and they're influencing the trajectory of how we are socially with one another.