Opinion Leaders Quotes

There are people in the world who have the power to change our values.

In our "age of the expert" the expert has his constituency — those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining the consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.

I know in our mainstream culture, the loudest voices and the most shocking voices are the ones that get the noise.

The people we want in our news prime-time space now are strongly opinionated people who I think, for the most part, attract audiences of like-minded people, who want to know 'what's our side thinking right now?'

Opinion elites begin to shape a debate.

I think the show does better with newsmakers and politicians than it does with actors.

The only people right now capable of mobilizing the public are talk show hosts.

Injecting new ideas into public debate is the supreme function of the newspaper columnist. Politicians and civil servants absolutely will not take the risk.

Acknowledge the complexity of the world and resist the impression that you easily understand it. People are too quick to accept conventional wisdom, because it sounds basically true and it tends to be reinforced by both their peers and opinion leaders, many of whome have never looked at whether the facts support the received wisdom. It's a basic fact of life that many things "everybody knows" turn out to be wrong.

The permanent power brokers of this city are the columnists.

We all have our opinions. But I suspect that writers are actually less worth heeding, because they regard themselves as so uniquely important, so culturally sensitive.

In Russia, as well as everywhere else, the true and lasting power is that of public opinion, and of those who know how to influence it.

Most of Washington punditry […] is private letters, written to other pundits, appearing in public space.

In Washington, no one believes anything unless it comes from 'The New Yorker,' 'New York Times' editorial page, or 'The Washington Post.'

I like what Lauren Duca and Alexandra Petri come up with when they're tweeting about politics.

Kudos to people who put themselves forward as the arbiters of taste.

Athletes have all the influence in the world. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say.

What Americans seem to prefer — or at least the subset of them who live on social media — is a private square of people who already agree with them. The most successful of these preachers we call “influencers,” which basically means they get paid to manipulate you, and somehow you listen to them anyway.

But it's more an up-versus-down issue because the research has shown that opinion leaders, whether they're elected officials, journalists, business leaders - it's academics, religious leaders - they have dramatically different views on immigration. A

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days?

I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.

There are a lot of columnists who get out and opine.

Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.

As much as we don't like to admit it sometimes, we are the influencers.

What I and other commentators do is attempt to move the public opinion. We try to change minds.