Quotes about public
page 27

Adolf Hitler photo

“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Hitler's interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “First Interview with Hitler, 4 May 1931,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews, New York: John Day Co., 1971, pp. 31-33. Also published under the title Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, published by Chatto & Windus in 1971
1930s

Michael Savage photo
Linda McQuaig photo
D. V. Gundappa photo
Emily Dickinson photo

“How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one's name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

288: I'm Nobody! Who are you?; In some editions "June" has been altered to "day".
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

“The first-known public lottery was sponsored by Augustus Caesar to raise funds for repairing the city of Rome; the first public lottery awarding money prizes, the Lotto de Firenze, was established in Florence in 1530.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Four, Coins, Wheels, And Oddments, p. 119

Francois Rabelais photo
Andrew Gelman photo
Hugo Chávez photo

“Privatization is a neoliberal and imperialist plan. Health can’t be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity and other public services. They can’t be surrendered to private capital that denies the people from their rights.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez during his closing speech at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. January 31, 2005. http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1486
2005

George Mason photo
Charlie Brooker photo
Tom DeLay photo
Herbert A. Simon photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
George Holyoake photo

“Mr. Owen looked upon men through the spectacles of his own good-nature. He seldom took Lord Brougham's advice "to pick his men." He never acted on the maxim that the working class are as jealous of each other as the upper classes are of them. The resolution he displayed as a manufacturer he was wanting in as a founder of communities…. No leader ever took so little care as Mr, Owen in guarding his own reputation. He scarcely protested when others attached his name to schemes which were not his. The failure of Queenwood was not chargeable to him. When his advice was not followed he would say : "Well, gentlemen, I tell you what you ought to do. You differ from me. Carry out your own plans. Experience will show you who is right." When the affair went wrong then it was ascribed to him. Whatever failed under his name the public inferred failed through him. Mr. Owen was a general who never provided himself with a rear guard. While he was fighting in the front ranks priests might come up and cut off his commissariat. His own troops fell into pits against which he had warned them. Yet he would write his next dispatch without it occurring to him to mention his own defeat, and he would return to his camp without missing his army. Yet society is not so well served that it need hesitate to forgive the omissions of its generous friends. To Mr. Owen will be accorded the distinction of being a philosopher who devoted himself to founding a Science of Social Improvement and a philanthropist who gave his fortune to advance it. Association, which was but casual before his day, he converted into a policy and taught it as an art. He substituted Co-operation for coercion in the conduct ot industry and the willing co-operation of intelligence certain of its own reward, for sullen labour enforced by the necessity of subsistence, seldom to be relied on and never satisfied.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

Robert M. La Follette Sr. photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Noel Gallagher photo

“He's now trying to make social comment, this is the guy who hid who he actually was from the public for 20 years. Now, all of a sudden, he's got something to say about the way of the world. I find it laughable. That's even before you get to the song, which is diabolical.”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Noel Gallagher cited in " Gallagher attacks 'liar' Michael http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2115582.stm" at news.bbc.co.uk, 8 July 2002. Remarks on George Michael's song "Shoot the Dog."
Controversy with other artists

Dana Gioia photo
Sandra Fluke photo
Rutherford B. Hayes photo

“The melancholy thing in our public life is the insane desire to get higher.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Letter "to a leading editor" (10 April 1875), as quoted in The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes (1876) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22037 edited by James Quay Howard, ch. X, p. 144

Henry Campbell-Bannerman photo
Samuel Adams photo
Andrew Sega photo
Tony Benn photo
Herbert A. Simon photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.”

Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics (1885; republished 1981), chapter 2, p. 69 (1981)
1880s

Errico Malatesta photo
Alistair Cooke photo

“In life no such colour brightened the grey picture of a man devoted to the daily study of warfare on several continents with all the ardour of a certified public accountant.”

Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) British journalist and broadcaster

(1959) About George Marshall
Source: Letter from America, 1946-2004 (2007).

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.”

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 29

Ronald Dworkin photo
Andreas Vesalius photo

“I strive that in public dissection the students do as much as possible.”

Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) early anatomist

De fabrica, quoted in O'Malley 1964, p. 144

“The third big idea is that we confess our sins to someone close to us--a friend or our spouse. I don't mean a public declaration of our shortcomings; I mean confession in the security of a trusted and living friend.”

Ted Haggard (1956) American minister

[Haggard, Ted, Simple Prayers for a Powerful Life, Regal Books, September 2002, p. 110, ISBN 0830730559]

Giorgio de Chirico photo

“The structure of cities, the architecture of houses, squares, gardens, public walks, gateways, railway stations, etc – all these provide us with the basic principles of a great Metaphysical aesthetic... We, who live under the sign of the Metaphysical alphabet, we know the joy and sorrows to be found in a gateway, a street corner, a room, on the surface of a table, between the sides of a box…”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 233
De Chirico's statement on Metaphysical aesthetic in painting motifs like houses, architecture, railway stations
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Ted Nelson photo
Rick Santorum photo

“When you look and see what the left is trying to do in America today, progressives are trying to shutter faith, privatize it, push it out of the public square, oppress people of faith, strip their charitable deductions away from them, trying to weaken them, churches — trying to say that anybody who believes in the value of Judeo-Christian principles, as we saw in the Ninth Circuit just this week, that if you believe that — this is what the court said — that if believe that, if believe what's taught in Genesis, if you believe what's practiced Biblically and in generations since, then you are irrational. The only possible reason you could believe this, according to the Ninth Circuit, is that you are a bigot, and that you are a hater. Because you can't possibly think differently, you can't possibly think differently unless you are a bigot or a hater, cause there's no rational reason not to see marriage as the way the Ninth Circuit does. They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what's left is the. What's left is a government that gives you rights. What's left are no unalienable rights. What's left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you'll do and when you'll do it. What's left, in France, became the guillotine.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're a long way from that, but if we do, and follow the path of President Obama, and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

referring to Ninth Circuit ruling unconstitutional , which banned same-sex marriage

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Alexander Hamilton photo
George W. Bush photo
Charles Krauthammer photo

“It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2010, The great peasant revolt of 2010 (2010)

Murray Perahia photo

“I wouldn’t play it in public — you need different muscles, you can’t use the upper arm, just the fingers. But the sound has a glow, because the strings aren’t damped, as on a piano. I wanted to visit Bach’s sound world, then apply those ideas to the piano.”

Murray Perahia (1947) American classical pianist and conductor

Of playing the harpsichord.
Jewish Chronicle interview http://thejc.com/home.aspx?ParentId=m14s150&AId=57994&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=murray%20perahia&srchtxt=1&srchhead=1&srchauthor=1&srchsandp=1&scsrch=999 (8 February 2008)

Éric Pichet photo
John Buchan photo
Geovanny Vicente photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Thomas Shapiro photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo

“We are told that we are a pack of Socialists and faddists, and that common sense is on the side of the Unionist party. Well, for my part, I am for going in for all progressive legislation step by step. I do not believe in the short cuts. If Socialism means the abolition of private property, if it means the assumption of land and capital by the State, if it means an equal distribution of products of labour by the State, then I say that Socialism of that stamp, communism of that stamp, is against human nature, and no sensible man will have anything to say to it. But if it means a wise use of the forces of all for the good of each, if it means a legal protection of the weak against the strong, if it means the performance by public bodies of things which individuals cannot perform so well, or cannot perform at all, then the principles of Socialism have been admitted in almost the whole field of social activity already, and all we have to ask when any proposition is made for the further extension of those principles is whether the proposal is in itself a prudent, just, and proper means to the desired end, and whether it is calculated to do good, and more good than harm.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech to the Home Counties Division of the National Liberal Federation (13 February 1889), quoted in 'Mr. J. Morley At Portsmouth.', The Times (14 February 1889), p. 6.

Winston S. Churchill photo

“I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1936/nov/12/debate-on-the-address#column_1105 in the House of Commons (12 November 1936)
The 1930s

Alberto Gonzales photo
Alistair Cooke photo

“Vot", asked George I courteously, "is the difference between a public nuisance and a public convenience?”

S. J. Simon (1904–1948) British bridge player and writer, comic fiction writer

No Nightingales

Vātsyāyana photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“I have always believed that freedom of information is so vital that only the national security, not the desire of public officials or private citizens, should determine when it must be restricted.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Statement on the Freedom of Information Act (1966)

Koenraad Elst photo
Coretta Scott King photo
R. H. Tawney photo
William Blake photo

“Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public RECORDS to be True.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson
1790s

Anthony Burgess photo
Al Gore photo
Horace Mann photo

“Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

As quoted in The Albany Law Journal Vol. XLIX (January - June 1894), p. 47; also paraphrased as: "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."

Hilaire Belloc photo
Adam Smith photo

“In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter V, p. 563.

C. Wright Mills photo
Newton Lee photo
Aurangzeb photo
Lin Join-sane photo

“The service trade agreement is a pact that benefits related sectors across the Taiwan Strait and promotes the interests of the public on both sides. It will result in a win-win situation for both sides.”

Lin Join-sane (1944) Taiwanese politician

Lin Join-sane (2013) cited in " Cross-strait service trade pact signed http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/06/22/2003565371" on Taipei Times, 22 June 2013.

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Alan Keyes photo
Albrecht Thaer photo
Brooks D. Simpson photo
Joseph Nye photo

“Some observers feel it is harder to change public opinion in democracies than it is to change policies in totalitarian countries.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 5, The Cold War, p. 125.

Charlie Beck photo

“I judge him by the results I see in Watts at our public housing developments where the Community Safety Partnership has positively changed the culture of relations between the community and the police department. Over the last few years, Watts and the LAPD have each undergone a remarkable transformation for which I credit Chief Beck.”

Charlie Beck (1953) Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department

Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino, quoted in: [December 5, 2014, http://www.laweekly.com/informer/2014/08/12/lapd-chief-charlie-beck-gets-another-5-years, Dennis Romero, August 12, 2014, LA Weekly, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck Gets Another 5 Years]
About

Andrew Johnson photo
David Graeber photo
Pat Condell photo
Paul Krugman photo
Paul Krugman photo

“What saved the economy, and the New Deal was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Op-ed, "Franklin Delano Obama," New York Times, November 10, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10krugman.html
The New York Times Columns

“Being covered in white paint, you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance, which did in fact cause offence to members of the public, and created a breach of the peace and public order.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 14 (Cit.after LockerWiener Aktionismus.Der zertrümmerte Spiegel.Wien1960-1971,op.cit., p. 299.)

Richard Whately photo
James Callaghan photo

“The Soviet Union's propaganda clearly wishes to use public opinion in this country to get the West to reduce its own arms while doing nothing themselves. In this way they would gain nuclear superiority. This is simply not on.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech at Cardiff (25 May 1983), quoted in Tim Jones, "Callaghan defends deterrent", The Times (26 May 1983), p. 1. This was during the 1983 general election in which the Labour Party had a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Post-Prime Ministerial

Philip Schaff photo

“The Pre-Lutheran German Bible. The precise origin of the mediaeval German Bible is still unknown. Dr. Ludwig Keller of Münster first suggested in his Die Reformation und die älteren Reformparteien, Leipzig, 1885, pp. 257-260, the hypothesis that it was made by Waldenses (who had also a Romanic version); and he tried to prove it in his Die Waldenser und die deutschen Bibelübersetzungen, Leipzig, 1886 (189 pages). Dr. Hermann Haupt, of Würzburg, took the same ground in his Die deutsche Bibelübersetzung der mittelalterlichen Waldenser in dem Codex Teplensis und der ersten gedruckten Bibel nachgewiesen, Würzburg, 1885 (64 pages); and again, in self-defense against Jostes, in Der waldensische Ursprung des Codex Teplensis und der vor-lutherischen deutschen Bibeldrucke, Würzburg, 1886. On the other hand, Dr. Franz Jostes, a Roman Catholic scholar, denied the Waldensian and defended the Catholic origin of that translation, in two pamphlets: Die Waldenser und die vorlutherische Bibelübersetzung, Münster, 1885 (44 pages), and Die Tepler Bibelübersetzung. Eine zweite Kritik, Münster, 1886 (43 pages). The same author promises a complete history of German Catholic Bible versions.
The hostility of several Popes and Councils to the circulation of vernacular translations of the Bible implies the existence of such translations, and could not prevent their publication, as the numerous German editions prove. Dutch, French, and Italian versions also appeared among the earliest prints. See Stevens, Nos. 687 and 688 (p. 59 sq.). The Italian edition exhibited in 1877 at London is entitled: La Biblia en lingua Volgare (per Nicolo di Mallermi). Venetia: per Joan. Rosso Vercellese, 1487, fol. A Spanish Bible by Bonif. Ferrer was printed at Valencia, 1478 (see Reuss, Gesch. der heil. Schr. N. T., II. 207, 5th Ed.).
The Bible is the common property and most sacred treasure of all Christian churches. The art of printing was invented in Catholic times, and its history goes hand in hand with the history of the Bible. Henry Stevens says (The Bibles in the Caxton Exhibition, p. 25): ""The secular history of the Holy Scriptures is the sacred history of Printing. The Bible was the first book printed, and the Bible is the last book printed. Between 1450 and 1877, an interval of four centuries and a quarter, the Bible shows the progress and comparative development of the art of printing in a manner that no other single book can; and Biblical bibliography proves that during the first forty years, at least, the Bible exceeded in amount of printing all other books put together; nor were its quality, style, and variety a whit behind its quantity.""”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Roman Catholic rival German versions of the Bible

John McCain photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“What has taken place is a shift of business from one manufacturer to another, and the announcements in the press as well as the general publicity of those manufacturers who have succeeded in increasing their business give, I think, the impression that this is true of the whole industry. If we could assume, for the sake of argument, that we will reach the point at which twenty-five million cars and trucks will be registered in the United States an assumption that from what we have accomplished so far is certainly perfectly reasonable then I think we could safely say that the replacement demand, plus the export demand which will increase for many years yet, plus the normal growth, would amount to something like four to four and one half million vehicles a year and would require the manufacture of a number of cars equal to or greater than has yet been produced in any year in the history of the industry…
I am sure that I do not need to elaborate what the automotive industry consists of, its influence on the prosperity of the United States, the influence that it has had in many other industries which contribute to its production necessities. General Motors is an important part of this great industry of ours and as my contribution to your visit with us I would like to tell you in a brief way something about General Motors; how we are thinking, what we are doing, and our ambitions for the future.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 332-3: Speech by President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., 1927 (II)

Henry Taylor photo
Jascha Heifetz photo

“If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.”

Jascha Heifetz (1901–1987) Lithuanian violinist

Heifetz official web site http://www.jaschaheifetz.com/about/quotes.html

Nina Paley photo

“Mimi: Copyright’s all about balance: balancing creators’ and the public’s need for free expression…
Eunice: with copyright lawyers’ need for paychecks!”

Nina Paley (1968) US animator, cartoonist and free culture activist

"Balance" (28 September 2010)
Mimi and Eunice (2010 - present)

Andrei Sakharov photo
Charles Stross photo
Richard Nixon photo

“Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, were all homosexuals. Nero, of course, was, in a public way, in with a boy in Rome.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, They're Born That Way (1971)

Gerhard Richter photo
Amani Abeid Karume photo

“It is rather shocking to note that opposition leaders, who are representatives of the wananchi (citizens), are themselves rejecting the participation of the wananchi in this major public issue.”

Amani Abeid Karume (1948) Zanzibari politician

On the referendum for the proposed formation of a coalition government; quoted in Mwinyi Sadallah, "Karume gives condition for meeting Seif," http://ippmedia.com/ipp/guardian/2008/05/20/114755.html The Guardian (2008-05-20).