American Public Quotes

#1. I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty. I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith.

Al Smith

#2. And if you take the cameras out of the courtroom, then you hide, I think, a certain measure of truth from the public, and I think that's very important for the American public to know.

Lance Ito

#3. Every measurement of where you have more public confidence in creating jobs, American prosperity, controlling crime, health care, providing education, all of these standards, Bill Clinton has considerably high marks. The sole exception is on protecting taxes, which is initially his attack.

Mark Shields

#4. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

Barbara Jordan

#5. While people are free to draw different conclusions from the facts, there should be no debate over whether the American public is entitled to have all of the facts.

Trey Gowdy

#6. The daily coverage of the Vietnamese battlefield helped convince the American public that the carnage was not worth the candle.

Walter Cronkite

#7. I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.

David Hare

#8. I believe that the future is determined by the great public universities. They educate 80 percent of the students and make the American Dream available.

Gordon Gee

#9. True conservation provides for wise use by the general public. The American people do not want our resources preserved for the exclusive use of the wealthy. These land and water resources belong to the people, and people of all income levels should have easy access to them.

George Aiken

#10. Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny - and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today.

Richard Posner

#11. I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.

Joseph Stiglitz

#12. Is the president purposefully using propaganda and hyperbole to garner the American public for support?

Sean Hannity

#13. I believe that a contract, or at least an understanding, exists between the American public and the American advertiser concerning what advertising is, what its limitations are and what price people will pay for it.

John O'Toole

#14. I truly believe that women of my generation can bring a new cleansing element to American public life.

Georgie Anne Geyer

#15. I want to thank the efforts of the American Public Health Association and its 200-plus partners who have organized events around the Nation that serve to raise everyone's awareness of the need to improve public health.

Lois Capps

#16. And the American public was able to make up their own mind whether this verdict was a just verdict or not. So I think there's a lot of value in the public being able to see how the system works or doesn't work, so I think there's a definite value there.

Lance Ito

#17. But somehow Carter's "battlefield of energy" never really filled up with eager American combatants. It just never felt like anybody was going to be draped in glory for taking public transportation, or carpooling, or turning down the thermostat and wearing a cardigan.

Rachel Maddow

#18. The Society of American Civil Engineers, someone who's going to come in and say to the public, we've looked at, we've examined, we've reviewed the repairs and we think they're strong enough to withstand the type of hurricane that - that could hit the city this season.

Marc Morial

#19. I'm dying twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five
This disturbs me,
but I try not to show it in public.

Essex Hemphill

#20. The American preoccupation with the law, which is certainly not past, was at its zenith in 1995. The 1980s, the late 1980s, had sort of begun to percolate up to public consciousness this enormous interest in the law.

Scott Turow

#21. But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#22. In examining the CIA's past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public.

Frank Church

#23. The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth
along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets
have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.

Katy Lederer

#24. The American public believes that health care is a right and not a commodity.

Michael Moore

#25. While different states and cities might look to different strategies for protecting public safety, we all can agree on this: we lose too many American lives to gun violence.

Martin O'Malley

#26. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO

Chuck Palahniuk

#27. Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.

John Lahr

#28. I hope that the American public understands that we have three levels of government. We have the (unintelligible) the executive, but there's legislative and the judicial, and the legislative obviously need to be just doing their job.

Stockard Channing

#29. Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety.

Jan C. Ting

#30. Well, if you were the American public, you saw a catastrophe. In general, you would say, "The biggest institutions of America - Washington, broadly, and Wall Street, broadly - they're to blame." And, broadly, they're right.

Jamie Dimon

#31. I think the American public has gone from really almost white-hot anger in 2010 to an anxiety knowing their government needs to work.

Steny Hoyer

#32. The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalized police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman.

Colin Ward

#33. I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone it's going to be recorded and it goes to the government. I think the public can understand that.

Raymond Kelly

#34. I strongly oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. We must stand for the right of every American to practice their faith according to the dictates of their conscience, whether it be in the public square or in the workplace.

Mike Pence

#35. A fundamental premise of American democratic theory is that government exists to serve the people ... Public records are one portal through which the people observe their government, ensuring its accountability, integrity, and equity while minimizing sovereign mischief and malfeasance

Sandra Day O'Connor

#36. You would think that Halloweens tomorrow because of their attempt to scare the American public.

Jim Sensenbrenner

#37. In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.

Neil Postman

#38. 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

#39. The American public should simply accept no distractions. In our democracy, it is our duty to hold our elected leaders accountable. We do it at the ballot box.

Wesley Clark

#40. A study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that every $1 increase in the price of gasoline is associated with an additional 1,500 motorcycle deaths annually.10

Charles Wheelan

#41. The real issue for the public is to figure out which narrative do we want. We can have a bigger government, if that's the public's choice. It'll just require higher taxes on every American. Do you want that, or do you want smaller government, smaller taxes?

Glenn Hubbard

#42. Somehow, the greater the public opposition to the health care bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway. Their attitude shows Washington at its very worst - the presumption that they know best, and they're going to get their way whether the American people like it or not.

Scott Brown

#43. There's a metaphor for the American public in here," Gansey murmered darkly, "but it escapes me at the moment.

Maggie Stiefvater

#44. American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.

Robert Kuttner

#45. The American public got to see for themselves every day, all day, how this trial progressed. There's a lot of value in the public being able to see how the system works.

Lance Ito

#46. I hope for an America where no president, no public official, no individual will ever be deemed a greater or lesser American because of religious doubt - or religious belief.

Edward Kennedy

#47. I think if more members of Congress would talk about what they see and what they want to do and what they want to accomplish, rather than talking about their opponent, we would begin to shape and reshape American public opinion on what the political world looks like.

Reid Ribble

#48. My ranch William S. Hart Park is for the benefit of the American Public of every race and creed.

William S. Hart

#49. There is no more effective way to radicalize American Muslim youth than for political leaders to make public displays of prejudice against all Muslims. Suspicion will undermine their sense of identification with America and alienate some from both the culture and from politics.

Miroslav Volf

#50. The American public's a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I'm going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I'm going to do it.

Joe Biden

#51. The period that I would anoint as the golden era in American journalism was from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. It had three separate major strands: the Civil Rights struggle over integration of schools and public facilities in the South; the Vietnam War; and Watergate.

Anonymous

#52. If the American public is so into morality in movies, why don't they throw more of their disposable income at religious-themed entertainment? For every 'Passion of the Christ,' there's a 'Fireproof' that comes and goes with no notice.

John Ridley

#53. As long as American liberals are going to keep announcing that they're embarrassed for their country, how about being embarrassed by our public schools or by our ridiculous trial lawyer culture that other countries find laughable?

Ann Coulter

#54. I think having Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House is going to send a very wonderful lesson to the American public that women can be strong, they can be tough, they can be effective, and they can lead this country as political leaders.

Ellen Malcolm

#55. A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

Camille Paglia

#56. I think that one thing that people are missing is that we are never going to be able to fix this country's [American] economy in the long run until we fix our public education system.

Michelle Rhee

#57. The Western public should learn and remember one essential thing about China: no matter what European and North American propaganda barks about the People's Republic, China is much more "democratic" than the West. It is democratic in its own way.

Andre Vltchek

#58. The backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

Susan Faludi

#59. All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officer, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.

Dennis C. Blair

#60. The American public really does have a death wish for me. They want me to die. I'm not going to die.

Courtney Love

#61. Species conversation is beyond a doubt an issue that truly matters to the American public.

Ian Somerhalder

#62. What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.

William Dean Howells

#63. I say, technically, I don't think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing. and I feel confident it will not be done for a very long period to come. I think we can leave that out of our thinking. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking.

Vannevar Bush

#64. If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.

David McCullough

#65. The opportunities of America opened out to me the public schools. They carried me to the professional training of an American university. I began by working with my own hands for my daily bread.

Herbert Hoover

#66. We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor

Benjamin Netanyahu

#67. Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur's strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public.

Victor Davis Hanson

#68. Sometimes the European and North American public like some things to be exotic and kept at arm's length. They don't want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that's at least as relevant as what's being done here.

David Byrne

#69. Private enterprise and private life depend on nurturant morality, but so does freedom in American life. Freedom is what public resources provide - freedom in a way that we take for granted but that needs to be brought out in the open.

George Lakoff

#70. Unbeknownst to most American investors, significant portions of their public pension, mutual fund, life insurance and private portfolios are comprised of stocks of privately held companies that partner with state sponsors of terror.

Frank Gaffney

#71. It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.

Susan Jacoby

#72. Absolute freedom of the press to discuss public questions is a foundation stone of American liberty.

Herbert Hoover

#73. They're just big in the eyes of the American public.

Eric Heiden

#74. TRUST, n. In American politics, a large corporation composed in greater part of thrifty working men, widows of small means, orphans in the care of guardians and the courts, with many similar malefactors and public enemies.

Ambrose Bierce

#75. Concealing one's true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.

Robert Dallek

#76. The key battleground in the war on terrorism, therefore, is in the minds of the American public.

Patrick J. Kennedy

#77. If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.

Richard Carmona

#78. I worry about my judgment when anything I believe in or do regularly begins to be accepted by the American public.

George Carlin

#79. Soldiers must possess integrity in order to build trust and confidence in themselves, our leadership, and the American public. Among the things I've learned during my career is that you must be honest with everyone about everything.

Glen E. Morrell

#80. The American public does not know poets exist.

James Broughton

#81. If we're trying to protect the American public, we should not put in place a travel ban.

Barack Obama

#82. The media, the corporations, the politicians ... have all done such a good job of scaring the American public, it's come to the point where they don't need to give any reason at all.

Michael Moore

#83. Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public

H.L. Mencken

#84. When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

Samantha Power

#85. Ask the American public if they want an FBI wiretap and they'll say, "no." If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone that helps the FBI find their missing child they'll say, "Yes."

Louis J. Freeh

#86. Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.

Henry A. Kissinger

#87. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#88. I view Al Jazeera as a very serious journalistic outfit. They have proven to observers around the world that they are serious and objective. They will have to, at a P.R. level, prove to the American public that that is the case. And I think that over time they will succeed at doing that.

Eliot Spitzer

#89. Ronald Reagan was a great role model for Respublicans party, and I think for most people. But he was a fellow that the American public just intuitively loved so much, that he could always get credit.

George W. Bush

#90. Unfortunately, one of the biggest misperceptions the American public harbors is that Katrina was a week-long catastrophe. In truth, it's better to view it as an era.

Douglas Brinkley

#91. The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.

Jeremy Rifkin

#92. I'm very hopeful that we'll see some change in our food system. I don't know how far we'll go, or how quickly we'll get there, but there is no question that a significant percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with the food system.

Michael Pollan

#93. I believe in infrastructure, I believe in investing in your hard assets. Where I think government starts to fail is when it starts getting itself weighed down with the social programs. And I think the American public just feels like a lot of that money is tossed aside and wasted.

Mick Cornett

#94. I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.

Thomas H. Cook

#95. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tell us something ugly about American public life.

Mark Steyn

#96. After eight months of one of the most intensive public and private investigations in American history, no one - no one - has come up with a shred of evidence that I had anything to do with the anthrax letters. I have never worked with anthrax. I know nothing about this matter.

Steven Hatfill

#97. The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.

Ron Chernow

#98. The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

Warren Buffett

#99. Shoot, I must have lived such a doggoned sheltered life as a normal, independent American up there in the Last Frontier, schooled with only public education and a lowly state university degree, because obviously I haven't learned enough to dismiss common sense.

Sarah Palin

#100. Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

Arthur C. Clarke