Quotes About Public life

It points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.

A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

on cultivating virtue upon practice] Rousseau held a similar view. The more a country asks of its citizens, the greater their devotion to it. "In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies." Under a bad government, no one participates in public life "because no one is interested in what happens there" and "domestic cares are all-absorbing." Civic virtue is built up, not spent down, by strenuous citizenship.

Public life...lacks coherence and drama. (History, by contrast, attains coherence and drama only in hindsight.)

When I hear people complain about fame, it always sounds to me like, "Why do they pay me in gold bars? Gold bars are so heavy." But fame is not creativity, it's the industrial disease of creativity. Fame is a real experience, but it's not a Canadian experience, and nothing about growing up in Canada prepares you for a public life.

Gough was a serious student but found time to gain a blue in rowing; he was later to say that the sport was an apt one for men in public life because you could face one way while going in the other.

Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure.

I don't think public life in and of itself can destroy you. I think it's the way people react to it, and some people are more sturdy than others... I don't think any one faction can be blamed for a person's self destruction - a certain amount of that has to be innate.