Public Quotes & Sayings

The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual. — Pankaj Mishra

Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces. — Theodore Roethke

You dreamed like all mothers do.
Until he began to speak aloud,
Your boy,
calling for justice in the market place,
Demanding integrity and fair play
in the courts and halls of business.
Declaring the Realm of God
Imminent,
Manifest . . .
Jesus leapt into the swelling crowds
like an axe into wood,
Uncompromising and unrelenting
in his passionate call
for peace and justice.
Jesus, your boy,
causing havoc in public,
critiquing and condemning
the status quo,
breaking rule after rule . . .
And with every speech,
with every act of defiance,
with every call to liberation,
with every amazing deed,
Your dreams of peace and liberation,
Your dreams of a secure old age,
Your dreams of grandchildren--
Evaporated. — Edwina Gateley

By extrapolating a little from Freud, it becomes possible to think of nationalism as a kind of narcissism. A nationalist takes the neutral facts about a people - their language, habitat, culture, tradition and history- and turns these facts into a narrative, whose purpose is to illuminate the self-consciousness of a group, to enable them to think of themselves as a nation with a claim to self-determination. A nationalist, in other words, takes "minor differences"- indifferent in themselves- and transforms them into major differences. For this purpose, traditions are invented, a glorious past is gilded and refurbished for public consumption, and a people who might not have thought of themselves as a people at all suddenly begin to dream of themselves as a nation. — Michael Ignatieff

We were determined by public opinions of us. Would we think we existed without outside confirmation? And how long would we live apart from others before we began to doubt our existence? — Doris Grumbach

Also, the high standard held up to the public mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees. — George Eliot

White House officials acknowledge in broad terms that a president's time and public rhetoric are among his most valuable policy tools. — Barton Gellman

In particular, I want to set a challenge to public bodies and private companies to improve gender balance on their own boards. — Nicola Sturgeon

The public health of five million children should not be left to luck or chance. — Jamie Oliver

I hold that two principles are important; first that there should be a steady expansion of public services, not an irregular one related to revenue accruing in any particular year; the second that taxes should be constant over long periods (provided, that is, that they are neither burdensome nor inequitable). — John James Cowperthwaite

For an academic to launch a public conversation about journalistic integrity, the role of religion in society, scholarship and faith is a dream come true. These are the kinds of things that we sit around talking to each other about in our dusty libraries. To see these conversations take place in popular culture is the best thing that could have ever happened. — Reza Aslan

Your death defines my life. I want to find the love we never had and explicate it in your name.
I want to take your secrets public. I want to burn down the distance between us.
I want to give you breath. — James Ellroy

When a parliamentary or social majority decrees that it is legal, at least under certain conditions, to kill unborn human life, is it not really making a tyrannical decision with regard to the weakest and most defenseless of human beings? ... While public authority can sometimes choose not to put a stop to something which were it prohibited would cause more serious harm, it can never presume to legitimize as a right of individuals even if they are the majority of the members of society an offense against other persons caused by the disregard of so fundamental a right as the right to life. — Pope John Paul II

Media was once about protecting a name; on the web it is about building one. — Ryan Holiday

You have to assume once you go online, anything you put there can be made public. Yet while you're online, you feel like it's a private, sacred space. But you're really broadcasting to the world. — Alex Gibney

Men in public life did their best to avoid accidental events or actions from being seen as unlucky. On a famous occasion during the civil war, Caesar tripped when disembarking from a ship on the shores of Africa and fell flat on his face. With his talent for improvisation, he spread out his arms and embraced the earth as a symbol of conquest. By quick thinking he turned a terrible omen of failure into one of victory. — Anthony Everitt

Government, possessing the power to create and issue currency and credit as money and enjoying the right to withdraw both currency and credit from circulation by taxation and otherwise, need not and should not borrow capital at interest as a means of financing government work and public enterprises. — Abraham Lincoln

It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections — Paul Johnson

It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about public humiliation. — Linus Torvalds

You make a film and you can't really pick the way it's put to the public. You control the content, but the way it's marketed, or the poster, or what they're telling the public about the film, it's beyond you. Some people don't even see them, because they think they already know it. That can be frustrating, when something you've done is marketed in a way you think is antithetical to what it is. — Richard Linklater

Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study [Lionel Logue said] — Mark Logue

Public unions are the country's foremost advocates for increased taxes at all levels of government. — Jonah Goldberg

The modern public school derived from a philosophy of freedom reflected in the First Amendment ... The non-sectarian or secular public school was the means of reconciling freedom in general with religious freedom. — William J. Brennan

For neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a re-sanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons' crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight. — Melanie Phillips

The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals. — Aldous Huxley

It's been very clearly brought to my attention that I had overlooked your security in public restrooms. — R.K. Lilley

Being able to read well in public and talk about your work in an engaging fashion is part of most writers' job specification. — Sara Sheridan

People bicker so and have such rows. Even if they're fond of each other, they still seem to have rows and not to mind a bit whether they have them in public or not. — Agatha Christie

The use of force stands in need of control by a public neutral authority, in the interests of liberty no less than of justice. Within a nation, this public authority will naturally be the state; in relations between nations, if the present anarchy is to cease, it will have to be some international parliament. — Bertrand Russell

Many newly public companies are able to post a year or two of strong sales growth off a small base, but their growth almost always slows over time, thanks to what investment professionals call 'the law of large numbers.' — Alex Berenson

I have often said in answer to inquiries as to how I got away with kidding some of our public men, that it was because I liked all of them personally, and that if there was no malice in your heart there could be none in your "Gags", and I have always said I never met a man I dident like. — Will Rogers

Google controls two-thirds of the US search market. Almost three-quarters of all Internet users have Facebook accounts. Amazon controls about 30% of the US book market, and 70% of the e-book market. Comcast owns about 25% of the US broadband market. These companies have enormous power and control over us simply because of their economic position. They all collect and use our data to increase their market dominance and profitability. When eBay first started, it was easy for buyers and sellers to communicate outside of the eBay system because people's e-mail addresses were largely public. In 2001, eBay started hiding e-mail addresses; in 2011, it banned e-mail addresses and links in listings; and in 2012, it banned them from user-to-user communications. All of these moves served to position eBay as a powerful intermediary by making it harder for buyers and sellers to take a relationship established inside of eBay and move it outside of eBay. — Bruce Schneier

You can put a public school and university in the middle of every block of every city in America - but you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education. — Billy Graham

And from all these evils they will be delivered, and their life will be blessed as the life of Olympic victors and yet more blessed. How so? The Olympic victor, I said, is deemed happy in receiving a part only of the blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more glorious victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public cost. For the victory which they have won is the salvation of the whole State; and the crown with which they and their children are crowned is the fulness of all that life needs; they receive rewards from the hands of their country while living, and after death have an honourable burial. Yes, — Plato

Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them. — Adam Smith

Another story tells of Grogan, passing through New York, performed a public burning of dollar bills, and the dollar dropped six points on Wall Street. — Jeff Nuttall

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. — John Berger

...to be able to impose on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. — Jane Austen

We are all a little desexualized, a little defeminized. We can't carry our bodies comfortably in a society that is so bent against women. In order to be a "brain" in the public realm, we control our "bodies. — Elif Shafak

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig ... The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. — Felix Frankfurter

tried to impose 'intelligent design' creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school - a move of 'breathtaking inanity', to quote Judge Jones — Richard Dawkins

During the first few minutes of your presentation, your job is to assure the audience members that you are not going to waste their time and attention. — Dale Ludwig

Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases. — Robert H. Jackson

Because my parents were American missionaries who sent me to public schools in rural Japan, I had to confront Hiroshima as a child. I was in the fourth grade - the only American in my class - when our teacher wrote the words "America" and "Atomic Bomb" in white chalk on the blackboard. All forty Japanese children turned around to stare at me. My country had done something unforgivable and I had to take responsibility for it, all by myself. I desperately wanted to dig a hole under my desk, to escape my classmates' mute disbelief and never have to face them again. — Linda Hoaglund

Vice President Biden's surprising declaration of unqualified support for gay marriage seems to have forced President Obama into a public endorsement of a controversial social issue. It is difficult not to suspect that Biden's pronouncement aimed to give the president some political cover. — Robert Dallek

Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces. — Rebecca MacKinnon

Some day, the public might actually revolt against the undemocratic system of seniority that allows Congress to keep the old ways of Washington ingrained into the culture of Congress. — Chuck Todd

I happen to have a public profile. Ditto newspaper editors. It's a result of what I do, not an end. — Steve Coogan

I would like to propose slow cycling. Commute by bike. At a stroke, you remove the need for and absurd cost of public transport. Cycling is almost completely free. There is no longer any need for the gym as you get fit by cycling. And you can go at your own pace. — Tom Hodgkinson

Today Facebook went public, just as Myspace's last user went private. — Conan O'Brien

Public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation. — Margaret Chase Smith

Stars are almost always people that want to make up for their own weaknesses by being loved by the public and I'm no exception to that. — George Michael

For the senior officers in Iraq, at least in 2005-2006, the responsibility was to the men at the top, the media, the message, the public back home - anything and everything, it seemed, but the soldiers under their command. And that's the ultimate betrayal of Iraq, the one that disillusioned me in Baghdad and Nineveh and keeps me outraged today. — Luis Carlos Montalvan

No good play is a success; fine writing and high morals are useless on the stage. I have been scribbling twaddle for thirty-five years to suit the public taste, and I should know. — W.S. Gilbert

Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic. — Edmund Burke

Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me. — Jack Kerouac

The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher ... Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate. — Peter Agre

I've got two bikes that get me everywhere I need to go. And public transportation. — Julia Butterfly Hill

There was a saying during the war: Those who decide late will always decide right. At Christmas in 1943 we could see that our front was moving backwards, but we had no real idea how bad it was. Anyway, no one could accuse Sindre of changing like a weather-vane. Unlike those at home who sat on their backsides during the war and suddenly rushed to join the Resistance in the last months. We used to call them the latter-day saints'. A few of them today swell the ranks of those who make public statements about the Norwegians' heroic efforts for the right side. — Jo Nesbo

The generosity of the American public toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami has been reflected in the outpouring of support for the Pakistani earthquake victims. — Jon Porter

If you think of global public goods like polio eradication, the kind of risk-taking new approach, philanthropy really does have a role to play there, because government doesn't do R&D about new things naturally as much as it probably should, and so philanthropy's there. — Bill Gates

The trouble with poverty, as an issue, is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public. — Paul Krugman

If the public likes you, you're good. — Mickey Spillane

It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overhead, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in the life, ever. — Donna Tartt

The public expects sentences to be punitive but also rehabilitative; however, what we expect and what we get from our prisons are very different things. The lesson that our prison system teaches its residents is how to survive as a prisoner, not as a citizen - not a very constructive body of knowledge for us or the communities to which we return. — Piper Kerman

Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else. — Glenn Greenwald

Talking about morality can be offensive. Morality is a politically incorrect subject. Many people are genuinely offended if someone speaks of morality and family values. It is okay if you talk about your sexual fantasies and deviances. This is called "liberation". But you would be frowned at if you talk about morality in public. Then you'd be accused of trying to impose your values on others. — Ali Sina

Jesus says, "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye" (Matthew 7:5). You see these dynamics when David arrives at King Saul's camp, bringing food for his older brothers. David is surprised to hear Goliath taunting the Israelites and their God. He is shocked that no one has the courage to challenge Goliath and blurts out, "Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?" (1 Samuel 17:26). David reacts to the split between Israel's public faith and its battlefield ... — Paul Miller

The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument. — Eli Pariser

Most people won't have opportunity to do full-time service, but those lucky enough to have monetary wealth or some spare time really can make an enormous difference. As someone who's now in the public sector, and is seeing up-close-and-personal the real impact of what we do and what we give, I can tell you: every dollar and every volunteer help, in more ways than you can count. — Michael Bloomberg

When you become a public figure, you still think, 'That's really not me; there's more to me than that.' — Edward Said

For all my years in public life, I have believed that America must sail toward the shores of liberty and justice for all. There is no end to that journey, only the next great voyage. We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we make. — Edward Kennedy

Dom is generous, loving and respectful to not only his submissive, but all women. He is gentlemanly in public, but playful in private and a savage in the bedroom. — Ella Dominguez

When it comes to our public services, decentralisation means giving power back to those on the front line - our doctors, nurses, teachers and physiotherapists, and our locally elected officials. — Charles Kennedy

The unions claim the deck is stacked against them when it comes to labor laws, but the truth is many private and public sector workers are forced to pay union dues as a condition of their employment, yet they have little say in how the unions spend their money. — Linda Chavez

Oprah Winfrey represents the most ingenious and creative expression of black spiritual genius in the public mainstream that we've had in quite a long time, if ever. — Michael Eric Dyson

An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out "skilled workers") that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a "value-free" education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative. — James K.A. Smith

Preferring steady progress, slow and imperfect, is a good philosophy for the defeated. — Fred Lowe Soper

Freedom is a public library. — Paula Fox

I was sick of my miserable childhood, too, the way it followed me across the Atlantic and kept nagging at me to be made public. — Frank McCourt

It was more the idea that my intimate moments - changing clothes, lying in bed, reading, crying - were all in fact public, available for observation by these strange men. — Piper Kerman

The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day. — Joseph Story

So, I mean, there's still vast swaths of the city that are suffering from a lack of jobs and poor housing and poor public schools, but they are building momentum - you know, techies, foodies, artists, musicians, all coming to Detroit. So there is this vibrancy. You see it in the newspapers every day - some story about the new Detroit. — David Maraniss

We cannot, therefore, blame the courts, public schools, media, or government for our own theological unfaithfulness. We are the ones - the prophets and priests - who have contributed to this "Ichabod," this departure of God's glory in our time. Only by returning to sound, effective God-centered preaching and teaching can we restore the confidence not only of Christians themselves in God's greatness, but of an unbelieving world that is more apathetic toward our benign, helpless, happy deity than hostile. — Michael S. Horton

Writing for publication is an odd hybrid of intimate self-exploration and public exhibitionsim. — Talia Vance

I don't think it's any secret that the public has lost confidence in the state government, and there's a lot of work that needs to be done on issues related to public integrity. — Eric Schneiderman

I can be a champion and a public servant also. — Manny Pacquiao

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms. — Horace Mann

Extreme weather threatens our energy and electric grid, federal buildings, transportation infrastructure, access to natural resources, public health, our relationships across the globe, and many other aspects of life. — Matt Cartwright

Visualize yourself confronted with the task of killing, one after the other, a cabbage, a fly, a fish, a lizard, a guinea pig, a cat, a dog, a monkey and a baby chimpanzee. In the unlikely case that you should experience no greater inhibitions in killing the chimpanzee than in destroying the cabbage or the fly, my advice to you is to commit suicide at your earliest possible convenience, because you are a weird monstrosity and a public danger. — Konrad Lorenz

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon's presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost. — Tim Weiner

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another. — Noam Chomsky

Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want, — Akio Morita

Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigor and capacity. — Thomas Huxley

I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision. — S. Bear Bergman

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

You walk into any supermarket or any shopping mall and ask the public what they are worried about. Not one of them will tell you they are worried about 12 years of Mitt Romney's tax returns. — John Sununu

The Federal Reserve ranks among the most transparent central banks. We publish a summary of our balance sheet every week. Our financial statements are audited annually by an outside auditor and made public. Every security we hold is listed on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. — Janet Yellen

What is my calling? What am I supposed to do? I think running for office, public office, can be a divine calling. I mean, I've wrestled with that very question myself. — Jim Wallis