Top 100 Public Interest Quotes
#1. Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
Aldo Leopold
#2. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it ... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'.
Robert A. Heinlein
#3. If a State has reliable scientific information that demonstrates that a warning is needed for a particular food, then in the interest of public health, it should share that information with the FDA and petition for a new national standard.
Nathan Deal
#4. Wherefore for the public interest and benefit of human society it is requisite that the highest obligations possible should be laid upon the consciences of men.
Isaac Barrow
#5. There are many organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest online - what's good for ordinary people - but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they are. I want that to change. And that's what I want to do next.
Sue Gardner
#6. Our approach is to reject the old vicious circle of the '80s-rising debt, higher long-term interest rates, higher debt repayment costs, lower growth, higher unemployment, then enforced cuts in public spending. That was the old boom and bust.
Gordon Brown
#7. People of the middle sort like us, thinking people that is, are always tongue-tied and awkward. What is the reason of it? Whether it is the lack of public interest, or whether it is we are so honest we don't want to deceive one another.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#8. When a donor is asked to contribute to a group whose innocuous-sounding name makes it appear to be doing work in the public interest, that donor should have a clear picture of where his or her money is going.
Eric Schneiderman
#9. [In government] the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other-that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.
James Madison
#10. No one's personal life is in the public interest. It's gossip, bottom line. End of story.
Kevin Spacey
#11. political life came to be dominated by a pattern of interest-group politics that the era's political scientists came to call "pluralist," a form of democracy marked more by competition among organizations and lobbyists than by a sense of the public interest.
Ira Katznelson
#12. In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.
James Q. Wilson
#13. A corporation has no rights except those given it by law. It can exercise no power except that conferred upon it by the people through legislation, and the people should be as free to withhold as to give, public interest and not private advantage being the end in view.
William Jennings Bryan
#14. Facebook draws from the public and public-interest sphere, a simultaneously bold and modest step towards acknowledging that our new networked technologies deeply affect our lives in ways not always captured or best shaped by the typical template of consumer and seller.
Jonathan Zittrain
#15. My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them.
Fran Lebowitz
#16. While I accept that there are certain things about my private life that will always be of interest to the public, it would be better if you give the same amount of attention to issues that matter as well.
Benigno Aquino III
#17. Honor sets all the parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very action connects them; thus each individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own interest.
Baron De Montesquieu
#18. 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
#19. Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.
George Will
#20. Municipal laws are a supply to the wisdom of each individual; and, at the same time, by restraining the natural liberty of men, make private interest submit to the interest of the public.
David Hume
#21. Whenever competition is feasible it is, for all its imperfections, superior to regulation as a means of serving the public interest.
Alfred Kahn
#22. The public is not interested in news in the public interest.
Terry Pratchett
#23. When we control business in the public interest we are also bound to encourage it in the public interest or it will be a bad thing for everybody and worst of all for those on whose behalf the control is nominally exercised.
Theodore Roosevelt
#24. I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice or ambition, or even the desire of fame
John Adams
#25. A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest, of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.
Thomas Jefferson
#26. The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.
Geoffrey Nunberg
#27. Corporate America corrupted the watchdogs that were supposed to be guarding the public interest by feeding them under the table.
Arianna Huffington
#28. Experience shows that nothing is operated with less economy and with more waste of labor and material of every kind than public services and undertakings. Private enterprise on the other hand naturally induces the owner to work with the greatest economy in his own interest.
Ludwig Von Mises
#29. No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.
Mark Twain
#30. The Federal Reserve System is a legal private monopoly of the money supply operated for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting the public interest.
Anonymous
#31. The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.
Walter Lippmann
#32. When the target of crime is armed, there is more law present, more public policy present, and more public interest served than by all 20,000 gun laws in force.
John Longenecker
#33. If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.
Jimmy Breslin
#34. A man, if he be active and energetic, can hardly fail also, be he never so selfish, of benefiting the general public interest.
Benjamin Butler
#35. I'm not deluded enough to think that everyone who knows my name is a listener. You know, I hope that part of that interest - part of that public interest - has to do with me still making records that people like.
John Mayer
#36. Harshness towards individuals who flout the laws and commands of the state is for the public good; no greater crime against the public interest is possible than to show leniency to those who violate it.
Cardinal Richelieu
#37. If the goal is to lower emissions, that's disconnected to most people. If the goal is to save taxpayers' money, now the public has some interest.
Mark Begich
#38. I have no interest in being famous. I'd love to vanish from the public eye as soon as I can.
Nadya Suleman
#39. If you are given a public responsibility, you have to listen, weigh up all the issues, but ultimately you have to form a view of what you genuinely think is in the public interest ... put the public interest above the vested interest.
Graeme Samuel
#40. You are in the field to defend the public interest, the financial truth for investors and the funds that should support the widow and the orphan.
Clarence W. Barron
#41. It is when the politician loves neither the public good nor himself, or when his love for himself is limited and is satisfied by the trappings of office, that the public interest is badly served.
John F. Kennedy
#42. As the contest proceeded, public interest increased and the entire country watched to see which company would win the big government subsidies through the mountains.
John Moody
#43. The story of how the Laffer Curve got its name begins with a 1978 article by Jude Wanniski in 'The Public Interest' entitled, 'Taxes, Revenues, and the Laffer Curve.'
Arthur Laffer
#44. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.
Adam Smith
#45. What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed ...
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#46. Editorial cartoons are about concept. The illustration is merely a vehicle to convey a point of view. We're here to protect and inform the public, to attack and repel those who do not agree with our long-term shared interest.
Michael Ramirez
#47. Also, the Federal Advisory Committee should be enlarged and reorganized. Members should be chosen for the broadest possible representation of the public interest, their main qualification: ability.
Wright Patman
#48. Why should anyone be interested in my life? It's the prurience I find so extraordinary. Why, why, oh why should my private life be of any interest to the public? The only people who should be interested are my friends.
Kate O'Mara
#49. It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.
Charles Darwin
#50. And thirdly, the FDA occasionally does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities.
G. Edward Griffin
#51. It is important that politicians defend their ability to act without fear or favour, and it is in the public interest that they hold ministers and public servants to account.
Jeremy Corbyn
#52. The papers, you know, they're always gonna just make stuff up. They think it's in the public interest.
Jake Bugg
#53. I'm not a celebrity. I'm intentionally and defiantly not a celebrity. I don't have any interest in it. I don't have any talent for it. I keep my personal life out of my public life as cleanly as I can.
Charlie Kaufman
#54. One can't allow blind loyalty to a friendship to lead one away from acting in the public interest. If Martin [Schulz] were to propose something that was totally absurd, our friendship would not prevent me from doing the opposite.
Jean-Claude Juncker
#55. Every woman who has any margin of time or money to spare should adopt some one public interest, some philanthropic undertaking,or some social agitation of reform, and give to that cause whatever time and work she may be able to afford ...
Frances Power Cobbe
#56. When you have giant corporations that give you a one track message of "finding a cure" or of "hope" it can give the public a false sense that someone is looking after their health interest and some cases even managing their health.
Ravida Din
#57. By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.
Milton Friedman
#58. Every man is to be considered in two capacities, the private and public; as designed to pursue his own interest, and likewise to contribute to the good of others.
Joseph Butler
#59. Government grows despite repeated failures to serve the public well because government's purpose no longer is to serve the public. Government now serves primarily the interests of those who work for the government.
Jack Kelly
#60. An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.
Friedrich List
#61. Faith is like private capital, stored in one's own house. It is like a public savings bank or loan office, from which individuals receive assistance in their days of need; but here the creditor quietly takes his interest for himself.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#62. The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in.
Terry Pratchett
#63. Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments.
Walter Benjamin
#64. Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite - via various appointed bodies - decide what the public's interest is for them.
Mark Steyn
#65. But the Nixon Administration gave the press an identity of its own, separate from the public interest, and then began to characterize the press either as friendly or hostile or what have you.
Timothy Crouse
#66. I want to encourage public interest in space. I have never let my condition stop me. You only live once.
Stephen Hawking
#67. In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.
George Grosz
#68. Cultural standards evolve. The meaning of the public interest also, of course, evolves.
Reed Hundt
#69. Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way.
Albert Goodwill Spalding
#70. The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an "officer of the court" and keep the general interest always in mind.
Hyman Rickover
#72. Advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest-it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes.
Howard Gossage
#73. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get attention. Most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn't matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some narrow interest.
Barack Obama
#74. Unfortunately, the media, which are not at all reluctant to act in their own self-interest, have succeeded in equating reform in the public mind with further restrictions on just about everyone else's freedom of political speech.
James L. Buckley
#75. A majority of Americans support Social Security and Medicare, a progressive tax system and a government that regulates business in the public interest, but most share deep skepticism about the government's ability to do all this well.
Adam Davidson
#76. The object of every free government is the public good, and all lesser interests yield to it. That of every tyrannical government, is the happiness and aggrandizement of one, or a few, and to this the public felicity, and every other interest must submit.
Marcus Junius Brutus The Younger
#77. Journalism has always existed in two different realities ... the economic marketplace and [the] special institution to serve the public interest. The traditional balance between those two has become destabilized. Economic reality has taken over.
Joan Konner
#78. Every special interest is entitled to justice full, fair and complete ... but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench or to representation in any public office.
Theodore Roosevelt
#79. The circumstances seemed to be simple; but they who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature.
Anthony Trollope
#80. The reason artists show so little interest
In public freedom is because the freedom
They've come to feel the need of is a kind
No one can give them they can scarce attain
The freedom of their own material ...
Robert Frost
#81. People do want to know, there is curiosity, it is a matter of public interest. That is not sufficient reason to disclose information. It is not sufficient that there be curiosity and interest that you want to disclose information.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam
#82. Roosevelt had defined the public interest in the previously private struggle between labor and capital.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#83. I think prime ministers, I actually think Cabinet ministers should be subject to intense scrutiny, I think that's in the public interest, even if some of the allegations made aren't right and so on, and they have to correct the record, it doesn't matter.
Alexander Downer
#84. I wouldn't have the slightest interest in running for public office. I'd rather make jokes about politicians than become one of them.
Johnny Carson
#85. I think the police and the FBI are quite capable of sacrificing the rights of a private citizen to what they consider the public interest.
Rex Stout
#86. Politicians will pander to special-interest groups eager to gain at the public expense.
Donald J. Boudreaux
#87. Positive market incentives operating in the public interest are too few and far between, and are also up against a seemingly never-ending expansion of perverse incentives and lobbying.
Mo Ibrahim
#88. The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead - higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.
Karl Rove
#89. It's important to know that, unlike lawyers, land surveyors put the public interest first. That means we're not biased by our client - this means that the property line will be drawn in the most equitable position, regardless of which neighbor is paying the bill.
Mark Mason
#90. Self-interest, be it enlightened, works indirectly for the public good.
William H. Prescott
#91. Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of 'the public interest' with private intersts means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interest and wishes of others.
Ayn Rand
#92. To give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god .
Socrates
#93. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.
Jonathan Haidt
#95. The diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#96. As with much of the world's problems, they become public
or much more of interest
the moment they begin to impact the West.
Chris Abani
#97. Quite simply, there can be no popular sovereignty without a real belief in the value of government. If government does not assume and carry out public responsibilities, less accountable institutions such as the corporation will do the job in their own self-interest.
Charles Derber
#98. The public good is promoted best by people pursuing their own private interests. This bothers some people because they're more concerned with motives than with results.
Walter E. Williams
#99. I am confident, however old-fashioned this may sound, that funds left in the hands of the public will come into the Exchequer with interest at the time in the future when we need them.
John James Cowperthwaite
#100. The interest of the public is never better advanced than when we can inculcate by our rules the advantage of acting honestly.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
