Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Peel

Public opinion, Peel implies, isn’t a noble chorus; it’s a volatile chemical mix, and any statesman who treats it as pure truth is practicing politics as self-deception. The brilliance of the line is its refusal to romanticize “the people” while also refusing to demonize them. He stacks the ingredients like an unflattering inventory: folly beside “right feeling,” prejudice beside genuine moral intuition. That juxtaposition matters. Peel is warning that the crowd can be simultaneously correct and irrational, ethically moved and easily misled. The job of leadership, then, is not to flatter sentiment or to sneer at it, but to sift it.

The final kicker - “and newspaper paragraphs” - is where the sentence turns from philosophy into media critique. Peel is writing in a Britain where mass politics is expanding: the Reform Act has widened the electorate, cheap print is accelerating, and party organization is hardening. “Public opinion” is no longer just drawing-room chatter or local grievance; it’s increasingly manufactured, framed, and amplified by a press learning how to convert attention into pressure. Peel’s phrase reduces lofty democratic rhetoric to something mundanely editable: paragraphs, not principles.

Subtextually, he’s justifying a leader’s right to resist the loudest wave without denying the electorate’s moral claims. It’s a defense of measured governance in an era discovering that the public can be both the source of legitimacy and the engine of distortion.