Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practising behaviors that the public didn’t want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.
Jared Diamond (b. 1937) American geographer, historian, ornithologist, author
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, “Big businesses and the environment” (2005)
(Source)
Quotations about:
public support
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Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America — not the battlefields of Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) Canadian philosopher, communication theorist, educator
In the Montreal Gazette (16 May 1975)
No law is stronger than is the public sentiment where it is to be enforced.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) American lawyer, politician, US President (1861-65)
Letter (1859-12-22) to John J. Crittenden
(Source)
Crittenden was a US Senator from Kentucky, a former Whig but at the time part of the American (Know-Nothing) Party. Lincoln was criticizing the idea of a party platform with the sole position of "The Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the laws," and used the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the North as an example.
See Lincoln (1858).
A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next to escape the censures of the world: if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public: a man is more sure of his conduct, when the verdict which he passes upon his own behaviour is thus warranted and confirmed by the opinion of all that know him.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English essayist, poet, statesman
Essay (1711-07-20), The Spectator, No. 122
(Source)
Writing of his (fictional) friend, Sir Roger de Coverley.
