#polls

You should go to the polls, organize yourself. But once lawmakers are chosen, they must be respected. ↗

— Lech Walesa

#go #lawmakers #must #once #organize

Government or politics in America today is big business. Everybody makes money involving themselves in one way or the other, whether it's pollsters, whether they are policy wonks, whether they are pundits, whether they are those who believe that they must call it as they see it and then to be fair about it. ↗

— Douglas Wilder

#america #believe #big #big business #business

In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? ↗

— Neil Postman

#ignorance #knowledge #media #nate-silver #opinions

Our own State Department polls say that 80 percent of Iraqis view the United States as an unpopular occupier. ↗

— Marty Meehan

#iraqis #occupier #our #own #percent

If the critics are right that I've made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them. ↗

— Barack Obama

#critics #decisions #good #i #made

Second, recent polls over there show that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave precipitously. ↗

— William Odom

#leave #majority #over #polls #recent

I don't look at polls. ↗

— Rick Scott

#look #polls

Senator Martinez is not driven by polls; he is driven by the needs of the state of Florida and its 17 million constituents. ↗

— Mel Martinez

#driven #florida #martinez #million #needs

We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls. ↗

— Peggy Noonan

#polls #priorities #voting #forgiveness

In most polls there are always about 5 percent of the people who 'don't know.' What isn't generally understood is that it's the same people in every poll. ↗

— George Carlin

#polls #humor