Parenting & Family Quote by J.B. Priestley

Polling, in Priestley’s hands, becomes less a democratic instrument than a nervous tic: the constant checking that mistakes observation for stewardship. The image is disarmingly domestic - children in a garden - but the bite is in the damage. Digging up a plant to “see how it’s growing” doesn’t just measure growth; it interrupts it, exposes roots, and can kill what it claims to care about. That’s Priestley’s warning: an obsession with taking the public’s temperature can help produce the very volatility it pretends to record.

The intent is slyly corrective. Priestley isn’t denying that opinions exist or that leaders should listen; he’s mocking the idea that society can be managed through perpetual measurement. The subtext is a critique of modern impatience: we demand immediate proof of progress, immediate verdicts, immediate reassurance. Polls satisfy that hunger with numbers that look authoritative, even when they’re describing something as seasonal, moody, and socially contagious as “public opinion.”

Context matters. Priestley lived through propaganda-heavy wars, the rise of mass media, and a mid-century Britain learning to treat “the public” as a quantifiable entity - a market segment, an audience, a mandate. His metaphor pushes back against that technocratic confidence. It suggests that a culture addicted to polling starts performing for the poll, shrinking politics into a feedback loop of approval-seeking. The garden still grows, Priestley implies, but not when we keep yanking it up to check our work.