Quotes About Public

Are we to understand," asked the judge, "that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?" "I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals." "What . . . what do you mean?" "I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices.

I don't blame our metallurgical department!" he said angrily. "I know that results of this kind are not a matter of any predictable time. But the public won't understand it. What, then, should we sacrifice? An excellent piece of smelting—or the last center of science left on earth, and the whole future of human knowledge? That is the alternative." She sat, her head down. After

You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good.

How can one deal in truth when one deals with the public? I don't understand you, she said very quietly. Questions of truth do not enter into social issues. No principles have ever had any effect on society. What, then, directs men's actions? He shrugged. The expediency of the moment

There are no solutions for the many contradictions inherent in the concept of "public property," particularly when the property is directly concerned with the dissemination of ideas. This is one of the reasons why the rebels would choose a state university as their first battleground.

los brutos, particulares o públicos, convencidos de que pueden gobernar a sus mejores por la fuerza, aprenderán la lección de lo que ocurre cuando la fuerza bruta tropieza con la inteligencia y con la fuerza aliadas.

There is no such thing as 'the public interest' except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of 'the public interest'—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without it.

Wearing the hijab has given me freedom from constant attention to my physical self. Because my appearance is not subject to public scrutiny, my beauty, or perhaps my lack of it, has been removed from the realm of what can legitimately be discussed.

Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists.

There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.

After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public—seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends—shifted to private homes. It was refreshing to go out once in a while, even to such a desultory event.

That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth.

I was discovering, the difficulty of competing in a game where there were no clearly defined rules, a game in which your opponents are not merely trying to put a ball through a basket or push it across your goal line, but are instead trying to convince the broad public—at least implicitly, more often explicitly—that in matters of judgment, intelligence, values, and character, they are more worthy than you.

Once you became president, people's perceptions of you—even the perceptions of those who knew you best—were inevitably shaped by the media.

The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints—all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn't love me back.

one of my main goals as First Lady is to never be photographed in a bathing suit.

At some basic level people were no longer seeing me, I realized, with all my quirks and shortcomings. Instead, they had taken possession of my likeness and made it a vessel for a million different dreams. I knew a time would come when I would disappoint them, falling short of the image that my campaign and I had helped to construct.

there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do, someone will be angry at you

But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives.

In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn't have to.

The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints - all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn't love me back.

An informed public depends upon literacy and language: its good use, conception, comprehension and incorruptibility.

when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.

Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.