Quotes & Sayings About Public Funds

My actions were intended solely to secure the repayment of funds, which I considered to be in the public interest, and I accept sole responsibility. I did not advise the prime minister of the means by which Sen. Duffy's expenses were repaid, either before or after the fact. — Nigel S. Wright

Ut because of the systematic neglect of cancer research: There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. They range in capital from about $500 up to about $2,000,000, but their aggregate capitalization is certainly not much more than $5,000,000 ... The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to match a major football game. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Our public credit is good, but the abundance of paper has produced a spirit of gambling in the funds, which has laid up our ships at the wharves as too slow instruments of profit, and has even disarmed the hand of the tailor of his needle and thimble. They say the evil will cure itself. I wish it may; but I have rarely seen a gamester cured, even by the disasters of his vocation. — Thomas Jefferson

I am not wrong in the belief that its public funds are more secure than those of all the European powers. — Albert Gallatin

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself. — Isaac Asimov

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. — John Updike

Faith is a homely, private capital; as there are public savings-banks and poor funds, out of which in times of want we can relieve the necessities of individuals, so here the faithful take their coin in peace. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Public and private funds have been thrown around like confetti at a country fair, to close up and destroy clinics, hospitals, and scientific research laboratories which do not conform to the viewpoint of medical associations. — Benedict Fitzgerald

Let us help."
"You already did." My voice didn't betray anything. "Both of you helped plan this. You lent me this
car. Aubrey put up the funds."
He raised his brow. "Lending you this car doesn't count as helping. It was more like public service.
If you drove your car, the noise would wake up all of Haverleau."
"It's not that bad - "
"Yeah, if you want to be as obvious as a rhinoceros."
I gave a pointed look at his lime-green coat and bright maroon sweater.
Talk about burning my retinas. "Pot calling kettle."
He glanced at himself. "It's seasonal. I look Christmasy. — Emma Raveling

If personal romantic and sexual behavior ends up being public, affecting public institutions and taxpayer funds, it's fair and reasonable to debate the issue, right?
Not according to many who favor alternate lifestyles. They would rather there be no debate. — Linda Harvey

Mutual funds charge 2% per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another 3-4 percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals. I think it's disgusting. It's much better to be part of a system that delivers value to the people who buy the product. But if it makes money, we tend to do it in this country. — Charlie Munger

It is obvious that politics would gain much in prestige if the money-raising campaign were conducted candidly and publicly, like the campaigns for the war funds. Charity drives might be made excellent models for political funds drives. The elimination of the little black bag element in politics would raise the entire prestige of politics in America, and the public interest would be infinitely greater if the actual participation occurred earlier and more constructively in the campaign. — Edward L. Bernays

The demise of higher education as a public good is also evident in light of the election of a number of right-wing politicians who are cutting funds for state universities and doing everything they can to turn them in training centers to fill the needs of corporations. This new and intense attack on both the social state and higher education completely undermines the public nature of what education is all about. — Henry Giroux

You can give your Social Security check to any organization, public or private, or to individuals. You can donate it to your favorite political party. You can give the funds to a student scholarship - for your grandchildren, for example - or to somebody who has a medical need. Or you can invest your government check in free enterprise. — Mark Skousen

And now after considerable experience with the many public institutions which I have managed, it has become my firm conviction that it is not good to run public institutions on permanent funds. A permanent fund carries in itself the seed of the moral fall of the institution. A public institution means an institution conducted with the approval, and from the funds, of the public. When such an institution ceases to have public support, it forfeits its right to exist. Institutions maintained on permanent funds are often found to ignore public opinion, and are frequently responsible for acts contrary to it. In our country we experience this at every step. Some of the so-called religious trusts have ceased to render any accounts. — Mahatma Gandhi

University presidents should be loud and forceful in defending the university as a social good, essential to the democratic culture and economy of a nation. They should be criticizing the prioritizing of funds for military and prison expenditures over funds for higher education. And this argument should be made as a defense of education, as a crucial public good, and it should be taken seriously. But they aren't making these arguments. — Henry Giroux

I must confess my distaste for any proposal to use public funds for the support of selected, and thereby, privileged, industrialists, the more particularly if this is to be based on bureaucratic views of what is good and what is bad by way of industrial development. An infant industry, if coddled, tends to remain an infant industry and never grows up or expands. — John James Cowperthwaite

Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called 'censorship.' If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples instead of oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds. But of course no such consistency is intended. This strained use of the word 'censorship' appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed. — Thomas Sowell

Bain also asked Kansas City for a $3 million tax break. The Bain executives were taking home $36 million in borrowed funds and were asking Kansas City to forfeit $3 million in public money for police officers, roads and schools? More free stuff! — Jennifer Granholm

You vote yourselves salaries out of the public funds and care only for your own personal interests; hence the state limps along. — Aristophanes

A large part of academic community is unthinkingly self-involved, producing reams of sterile writing - often consuming unbelievable amounts of public funds - and serving as an instruction manual for how to chase away readers and ignore historical insights. — Gotz Aly

I am confident, however old-fashioned this may sound, that funds left in the hands of the public will come into the Exchequer with interest at the time in the future when we need them. — John James Cowperthwaite

America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living - including the inhabitants of the slums. — Ayn Rand

There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions — Ludwig Von Mises

By the aristocracy of finance must here be understood not merely the great loan promoters and speculators in public funds, in regard to whom it is immediately obvious that their interests coincide with the interests of the state power. All modern finance, the whole of the banking business, is interwoven in the closest fashion with public credit. — Karl Marx

When people affected by epilepsy are reluctant to expose their condition, the public remains in the dark about it - a tragic irony that has made patient care and raising funds for research more than challenging. — Lynda Resnick

The government can access these funds but only following approval by the parliament to support our budget requirements and investments in infrastructure development, education, public health, and so on. — Jose Ramos-Horta

Last year I was on Pat Robertson's show, and we discussed our basic Christian faith - for instance, separation of church and state. It's contrary to my beliefs to try to exalt Christianity as having some sort of preferential status in the United States. That violates the Constitution. I'm not in favor of mandatory prayer in school or of using public funds to finance religious education. — Jimmy Carter

To stabilize the nation's public-employee pension systems and to prevent federal taxpayers from being billed for failed pension funds, I have introduced the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act in Congress. — Devin Nunes

To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public. — Natalie Massenet

We can only restore faith in government if the state itself becomes an efficient, effective and transparent ally of the people. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, abuses of power and the misappropriation of public funds must end. — Victor Ponta

Donating money to a few of my favorite free-market organizations used to be a pleasant duty, but now I'm literally inundated with demands from hundreds of think tanks and public-policy groups, all vying for my limited funds — Mark Skousen

While public funds evaporate in feasts of fraternity, a bell of rosy fire rings in the clouds. — Arthur Rimbaud

If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school. — Jonathan Kozol

Once again, we see the Bush administration paying for its failed policies by cutting funds to vital public services and jeopardizing more American jobs. — Corrine Brown

You are in the field to defend the public interest, the financial truth for investors and the funds that should support the widow and the orphan. — Clarence W. Barron

As more government functions are privatized, we find political leaders defunding the public school system, shifting government funds to the private, for-profit school industry. — Hank Johnson

[The stimulus bill funds] a bureaucratic structure for the government to begin rationing the health care of the American people. They can then lead a national, populist, grassroots movement to force Congress to pass the bill, and President Obama to sign it, educating the public along way about the intractable problems of socialized medicine. — Peter Ferrara

Those who want luxury cars should buy them at market rates and not ... abuse public funds. — Gideon Gono

I know the South claims that it has spent millions for the education of the blacks, and that it has of its own free will shouldered this awful burden. It seems to be forgetful of the fact that these millions have been taken from the public tax funds for education, and that the law of political economy which recognizes the land owner as the one who really pays the taxes is not tenable. It would be just as reasonable for the relatively few land owners of Manhattan to complain that they had to stand the financial burden of the education of the thousands and thousands of children whose parents pay rent for tenements and flats. Let the millions of producing and consuming Negroes be taken out of the South, and it would be quickly seen how much less of public funds there would be to appropriate for education or any other purpose. — James Weldon Johnson

Fact is Our Lord knew all about the power of money: He gave capitalism a tiny niche in His scheme of things, He gave it a chance, He even provided a first installment of funds. Can you beat that? It's so magnificent. God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories. — Georges Bernanos

It's important that public funds be spent in research directions that are pushing market frontiers rather than working in existing areas. This means funding research not only on drugs but also on areas like life-style changes, even if the profit potential is lower for Big Pharma as you cannot sell that change as you can sell a medicine. — Mariana Mazzucato

America, the land of the free, is turning itself into the land of the free ride. [U.S. airlines] are operating in protected markets. They are hoovering up public funds and they still can't make a profit. — Rod Eddington

The S&P is up 343.8 percent for 10 years. That is a four-bagger. The general equity funds are up 283 percent. So it's getting worse, the deterioration by professionals is getting worse. The public would be better off in an index fund. — Peter Lynch

Even fans of actively managed funds often concede that most other investors would be better off in index funds. But buoyed by abundant self-confidence, these folks aren't about to give up on actively managed funds themselves. A tad delusional? I think so. Picking the best-performing funds is 'like trying to predict the dice before you roll them down the craps table,' says an investment adviser in Boca Raton, FL. 'I can't do it. The public can't do it.' — Paul Samuelson

If one is to use public funds he must accept a responsibility to the public. — Thomas Francis Jr.

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education. — Jonathan Kozol

When the fountains of government [borrowing] abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to public works, then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world. — John T. Flynn

Since when do grown men and women, who presume to hold high government office and exercise what they think of as "moral leadership," require ethics officers to tell them whether it is or isn't permissible to grab the secretary's behind or redirect public funds to their own personal advantage? — Meg Greenfield

Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes — Thomas Sowell

The trouble is that privacy is at once essential to, and in tension with, both freedom and security. A cabinet minister who keeps his mistress in satin sheets at the French taxpayer's expense cannot justly object when the press exposes his misuse of public funds. Our freedom to scrutinise the conduct of public figures trumps that minister's claim to privacy. The question is: where and how do we draw the line between a genuine public interest and that which is merely what interests the public? — Timothy Garton Ash

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens. — Ludwig Von Mises

The loan crisis and the increasing slashing of funds for students, coupled with the astronomical rise in tuition, represent an unparalleled attack on the social state. The hidden agenda here is that when students graduate with such high debts, they rarely choose a career in public service; instead, they are forced to go into the corporate sector, and I see these conditions, in some ways, as being very calculated and as part of a larger political strategy to disempower students. — Henry Giroux

Because of the oil-and-water relationship governments have cultivated between ethics and political economy, speaking in plain terms - spelling it out as it is - as become foreign to the public. So here goes: When government sports a surplus, this implies that the political pickpockets have stolen more funds than they can possibly dream of spending. The property is not theirs to keep! Conversely, when deficits are reported, this means that the kleptomaniacs have not been able to steal sufficient funds to cover their profligacy. — Ilana Mercer

If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors. — Michael Parenti

The general systems of money management today require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. Mutual funds charge two percent per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another three to four percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals. — John C. Bogle

In our day, you can mock religion in public and even get funds for doing it. But you can't show respect for religion in public - or you risk being hauled into court. — Charles Colson

The evidence for indicting immunisations for SIDS is circumstantial, but compelling. However, the keepers of the keys to medical-research funds are not interested in researching this very important lead to the cause of an ongoing, and possibly preventable, tragedy. Anything that implies that immunisations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed. Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunisations are killing thousands of babies? — Frederick Douglass

Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy. — Aristophanes

At the most basic level, a central bank must be clear and open about its actions and operations, particularly when they involve the deployment of public funds. — Ben Bernanke

One: An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example: weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations, mining corporations cannot run newspapers, business houses cannot fund universities, drug companies cannot control public health funds. Two: Natural resources and essential infrastructure - water supply, electricity, health, and education - cannot be privatized. Three: Everybody must have the right to shelter, education, and health care. Four: The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents' wealth. — Arundhati Roy

Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required (think stimulus) by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other. — Ludwig Von Mises

As governor of New Mexico, I would have - I signed a bill banning late term abortion. I've always favored parental notification. I've always favored counseling. I've always favored the notion of no public funds used for abortion. — Gary Johnson

As long as a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, get equal time with hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists, the public inevitably ends up with a misimpression about the state of our scientific understanding. — Joseph J. Romm

When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox — H.L. Mencken

I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs. — Jim Clyburn

It's clear to me when you do private equity well, you're making companies more efficient and helping them grow and become more profitable. That success means our investors - such as public pension funds - benefit, which contributes to the economic wealth of society. — David Rubenstein

The public schools are supported entirely, in most communities, by public funds-funds exacted not only from parents, nor alone from those who hold particular religious views, nor indeed from those who subscribe to any creed at all. — William J. Brennan

The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, the municipalities of Rana, Hemnes, Hattjelldal and Narvik invested some $120 million of their taxpayers' money in CDOs secured on American subprime mortgages. — Niall Ferguson

We don't know what proportion of public funds is regularly lost to collusion and corruption. Is it 25 per cent? 30 per cent? We do know that a portion of these public funds are feeding organized crime. — Pauline Marois

You have a situation in which the U.S. is fighting three unjust wars and wasting trillions of dollars in public funds, all the while draining money from important social services and public and higher education. — Henry Giroux

Even non-commercial media rely on transferring cost to users through licence fees, donations from listeners, viewers, or readers, or grants from companies and foundations that have wrestled their funds from the public in some form of earlier commercial activity. — Robert G. Picard

Community. A friend started a real estate brokerage a few years ago. By the time she'd added her second employee, she was a pillar of her 35,000-person community. No rule says that only the local banker or car dealer can organize the program to raise supplemental funds for the public library or send the high school band on a well-earned special trip. Participating in community affairs, with time more than dollars, is good business from day one. It gets your name around, adds to your distinctiveness, and, best of all, makes you an attractive employer (which is the key to sustained success). — Tom Peters