There is often little to distinguish what Beijing wants from what Canada's foreign affairs mandarins want out of the Canada-China relationship, which is in any case rarely even close to what Canadians want - like some demonstrable public benefit for once, the opinion polls consistently show.
You can't forge a new sort of consensus, you can't forge public opinion, by following public opinion.
Forks often arise from differences of opinion in the direction of a project. And tokens are increasingly a mechanism for voting on changes to their protocols. Since the point of a fork is to try a new path, the new fork may not want to port all of the prior holders opposed to trying the new path the fork was created to take.
Because I have an opinion, I have become public enemy number one to the Fox News Channel and the right wing.
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press - that's the cornerstone.
Practicing free speech on an open platform is a perilous path for any public figure, and there are no get-out-of-jail free passes in the court of public opinion.
The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.
There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.
There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress.
The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive - that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume and so endlessly available.
Al Qaeda doesn't abide by the Geneva Conventions, so in my opinion, they should not be afforded the protections of them.
It is not differences of opinion; it is geographical lines, rivers, and mountains which divide State from State, and make different nations of mankind.
You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again.
I want to remind people that the Nazis weren't able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn't have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.
I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.
A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge - out of fairness to goats.
I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.
