Quotes & Sayings About Public Service Work

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life's work shows our children that we don't chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed. — Michelle Obama

The relationship between nurturance and moral self-interest can be seen most clearly in nurturant forms of business practice. It involves the humane treatment of employees, the creation of a safe and humane workplace, social and ecological responsibility, fairness in hiring and promotion, the building of a work community, the development of excellent communication between employees and management and between the company and its customers, opportunities for employee self-development, a positive role in the larger community, scrupulous honesty, a regard for one's customers and for the public, and excellent customer service. Policies such as these have increased the productivity and success of many businesses. They are models of how Nurturant Parent morality can function to help businesses be successful and to allow owners, investors, and employees to seek their self-interest within this moral system. Moral — George Lakoff

Honorable Senators: My sincerest thanks I offer you. Conserve the firm foundations of our institutions. Do your work with the spirit of a soldier in the public service. Be loyal to the Commonwealth and to yourselves and be brief; above all be brief. — Calvin Coolidge

Well, first of all, hello, I'm Lance Jennings and I'm an actor," he explained to the judge, sounding like he was doing a public service announcement. "I was hired to do promotional work for the Bucket O' Chicken restaurant. I was not informed that I might be verbally abused and attacked in the street!"

"Objection. Nonresponsive," Braden interrupted.

"Get to the point, Mr. Jennings!" Judge Channing admonished.

"I was simply playing my role out on the sidewalk when a cretin with dreadlocks began calling me a murderer. Like I killed the damned chickens myself! I don't even like chicken!"

"He called you a 'murderer'. Did he threaten you in any way?" I asked with a glimmer of hope. Maybe I could at least build a record to support a defense for trial.

"Yes! He asked me how I would like it if someone lopped off my leg and served it with gravy! I was in fear for my life!" There went the glimmer. The chicken was a ham. — N.M. Silber

The "public" does not work - a sentence like "most of the American public works in the service industry" would never appear in a magazine or paper, and if a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, her editor would certainly change it to something else. It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work: — David Graeber

Government workers think the job of everyone else in the economy is to protect their high salaries, crazy work rules and obscene pensions. They self-righteously lecture us about public service, the children, a 'living wage' all in the service of squeezing more money from the taxpayer to fund their breathtakingly selfish job arrangements. — Ann Coulter

The TSA holds its screener work force to the highest standards of security and professionalism, .. and will continue to focus on these principles as critical elements in the ongoing effort to provide the traveling public with world-class security and world-class customer service. — Robert Johnson

Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-classparents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement
a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible. — David Elkind

Which is more worthwhile earning: a large fortune or the esteem and gratitude of the nation? This question is prompted anew by the death of ex-Secretary of the Interior [Franklin K.] Lane. He remained in public service, doing most noble work, until his means became absolutely exhausted, and he died before having had the opportunity to reaccumulate any bank account ... He died leaving no estate whatsoever. Is what he did leave more to be desired, more to be coveted, than a fortune reaching into six or seven figures? — B.C. Forbes

It is our job to work for the government of the day and so that means working for Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and we need to do those preparations just to be sure that we're ready for whoever you, the British public, elect and that's core to our civil service values over the last 150 years. — Gus O'Donnell

Law students are famous for busting their buns to make high grades, sometimes at the expense of health and relationships, thinking, 'Later I'll be happy, because the American dream will be mine,' " said Lawrence S. Krieger, a law professor at Florida State University and an author of the study. "Nice, except it doesn't work." The problem with the more prestigious jobs, said Mr. Krieger, is that they do not provide feelings of competence, autonomy or connection to others - three pillars of self-determination theory, the psychological model of human happiness on which the study was based. Public-service jobs do. — Anonymous

The more we increase the active participation and partnership with young people, the better we serve them ... And the more comprehensively we work with them as service partners, the more we increase our public value to the entire community. — Maria Del Carmen Martinez-Bordiu Y Franco

Public service announcements were first created by the Ad Council during World War II to get Rosie to work and to tighten loose lips. In 1971, on the second Earth Day, the world met "the crying Indian," played by Iron Eyes Cody. The famous anti-pollution ad, which showed Cody paddling a canoe and watching motorists litter, effectively gave the new ecology movement a huge boost. As it turns out, Cody was of Italian descent (real name Espera DeCorti), but he appeared in hundreds of movies and TV shows as a Native American and denied his European ancestry until his death in 1999. — Mark Jacob

For the admirable gift of himself, and for the magnificent service he renders humanity, what reward does our society offer the scientist? Have these servants of an idea the necessary means of work? Have they an assured existence, sheltered from care? The example of Pierre Curiee, and of others, shows that they have none of these things; and that more often, before they can secure possible working conditions, they have to exhaust their youth and their powers in daily anxieties. Our society, in which reigns an eager desire for riches and luxury, does not understand the value of science. It does not realize that science is a most precious part of its moral patrimony. Nor does it take sufficient cognizance of the fact that science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering. Neither public powers nor private generosity actually accord to science and to scientists the support and the subsidies indispensable to fully effective work. — Marie Curie

How do we break free from the dichotomies that limit God's power in our lives? How can love and service to God become living sparks that light up our whole lives? By discovering a worldview perspective that unifies *both* secular and sacred, public and private, within a single framework. By understanding that all honest work and creative enterprise can be a valid calling from the Lord. And by realizing that there are biblical principles that apply to every field of work. These insights will fill us with purpose, and we will begin to experience the joy that comes from relating to God in and through every dimension of our lives. — Nancy Pearcey

Hillary Clinton's a highly intelligent woman, hard-working, she's dedicated her life to public service, but unfortunately, she does not have a track record of accomplishment or transparency ... She's not the woman for the White House. — Carly Fiorina

Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We can no longer afford to scrap-pile people. — Maggie Kuhn

I'm going to explore the possibility that my future work could be in public service rather than corporate work. — Mike McGavick

I think public service is a calling and you do it as long as the things that brought you into the office can continue getting you up in the morning and as long as there's still work to get done. — Anthony Foxx

I determined absolutely that never would I join a company in which finance came before the work or in which bankers or financiers had a part. And further that, if there were no way to get started in the kind of business that I thought could be managed in the interest of the public, then I simply would not get started at all. For my own short experience, together with what I saw going on around me, was quite enough proof that business as a mere money-making game was not worth giving much thought to and was distinctly no place for a man who wanted to accomplish anything. Also it did not seem to me to be the way to make money. I have yet to have it demonstrated that it is the way. For the only foundation of real business is service. — Henry Ford

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.
[From the will of GBS] — George Bernard Shaw

The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the fire or caulking that crack. They are thus unable to take the innovation seriously, let alone to try to compete with it. They do not, as a rule, even notice it until it has grown so big as to encroach on their industry or service, by which time it has become irreversible. In the meantime, the innovators have the field to themselves. — Peter F. Drucker

She believed in public service; she felt she had to roll up her sleeves and do something useful for the war effort. She organized a Comfort Circle, which collected money through rummage sales. This was spent on small boxes containing tobacco and candies, which were sent off to the trenches. She threw open Avilion for these functions, which (said Reenie) was hard on the floors. In addition to the rummage sales, every Tuesday afternoon her group knitted for the troops, in the drawing room
washcloths for the beginners, scarves for the intermediates, balaclavas and gloves for the experts. Soon another battalion of recruits was added, on Thursdays
older, less literate women from south of the Jogues who could knit in their sleep. These made baby garments for the Armenians, said to be starving, and for something called Overseas Refugees. After two hours of knitting, a frugal tea was served in the dining room, with Tristan and Iseult looking wanly down. — Margaret Atwood

There is a possibility of fresh talent coming to work for the government. Millennials are the most public-spirited generation since the 1960s. There is an opportunity to harness that generation and make government service cool again. — Tim O'Reilly

I will provide friendly and courteous service and will work closely with all departments in the county. I will abide by the Texas Information Act in providing information to the public. — Anne Grant

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon's founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old "gatekeepers" of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. "Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation," Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. "When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say 'that will never work!' And guess what - many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity. — Brad Stone

What we have to be judged by is the work we try to do. It's public service, not perfect service. — Jesse Jackson