Andrew Kohut quotes

I think polling is the best way of gauging public opinion - doing something that's independent, that's quantitative, that doesn't give just the loud voices about how things are going; or doesn't give so called experts the notion that they know what public opinion is. I think that's what makes public opinion polling pretty important. Qualitative assessments of public opinion; going out and talking to people and understanding the nuance to what's behind the numbers. I think it's awfully important as well.
-- Andrew Kohut

#Independent #Thinking #People

Certainly polling is a tool for leadership. It's not a program for leadership. And you can abuse a tool. You can overuse it. A leader who looks to the latest poll finding and says, "Well that's what I should do", that's not a very good leader. I mean that's someone who is not taking this poll and saying, "Well what am I gonna have to do to get public acceptance of my policies?" It's someone who is interested in their own election or re-election, and their own popularity rather than genuinely serving the public interest.
-- Andrew Kohut

#Mean #Acceptance #Leader

I think polling is important because it gives a voice to the people. It gives a quantitative, independent assessment of what the public feels as opposed to what experts or pundits think the public feels. So often it provides a quick corrective on what's thought to be the conventional wisdom about public opinion. There are any number of examples that I could give you about how wrong the experts are here in Washington, in New York and elsewhere about public opinion that are revealed by public opinion polls.
-- Andrew Kohut

#Independent #Thinking #People

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Like most parents, I've been stumped by homework, the big questions, such as: 'What is the point of geography - the pilot always knows where we are going?'. Answer: 'If you didn't know any geography, people would think you were an American, and you wouldn't be able to put them right because you wouldn't know where they live.'

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't.

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace.

Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different... Jews almost everywhere form a special society... Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling...

There's the South Pole, said Christopher Robin, and I expect there's an East Pole and a West Pole, though people don't like talking about them.

I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy.

People who deal with life generously and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end.

The science of anti-Semitism finally comes to explain this phenomenon, enlightening further the consciousness of people, fully satisfying their instinct and its violent eruptions thus legitimized by revealing their cause - the parasitism of the Jews. Thus it gives us the formula of the scientific solution for the problem of Judaism, which in order to realize we have only to apply.