Top 100 Public Life Quotes
#1. I have a responsibility to not look crazy in public. I don't want to be the person where later in life when I have kids, to say, 'Don't do this' and my kids go, 'But Mom, you did it.'
Raven-Symone
#2. To know that children are suffering and going without food is intolerable in a society such as ours. I hope that all our leaders, in both the public and private sectors, will work tirelessly to eradicate hunger. We all have a responsibility to bring back life to our most precious natural resource.
Joan Lunden
#3. The only time I felt a little too exposed was for a week then I started life-streaming for a couple of hours a day on Qik and Ustream. It became very much like the film 'We Live in Public.'
Jason Calacanis
#4. What fools the public were! They were exactly like sheep ... thought Mr. Abbott sleepily ... following each other's lead, neglecting one book and buying another just because other people were buying it, although, for the life of you, you couldn't see what the one lacked and the other possessed.
D.E. Stevenson
#5. If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.
Simone Weil
#6. The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.
Herman Wouk
#7. Everything about my life is private, really. I'm not so sure that any of it has ever been public.
Morrissey
#8. Administrators are there because of the fans and the cricketers to run this game, so credibility of a game, or a board, or even a government for that matter, is important irrespective of what you do. If you are in public life, it is important.
Rahul Dravid
#9. Public education is a good foundation on which to build a better life for each of us. And if we want to prove to these children who never made the mess in the first place that education is worth the trouble, our schools have to inspire them so they can do what they ought to do.
Bill Cosby
#10. I could write pages and pages about the delights of being a full-time housewife and mother and trying to write and support a family with two babies - but I don't use that kind of language in public.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#11. I'd like to have another opportunity to serve. I believe in service. I enjoy it. I also like coming and going, you know, because I think that my private-sector life has contributed to how I think about public-sector challenges and what I do in the public sector.
Deval Patrick
#12. Most of the memorable events I have myself been exercised in; and, for the satisfaction of the public, will briefly relate the circumstances of my adventures, and scenes of life, from my first movement to this country until this day.
Daniel Boone
#13. Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end.
Richard Sennett
#14. Everybody has a public life, and they have their own private life. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody has their own private, you know, agonies as well as joys. And that's what great drama, whether it's the movies or the theater, that's what it shows.
Annette Bening
#15. 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
#16. The politician, Johnson's experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#17. The "public" seems to have bought into this belief that life can, and should, be run without risk, that all accidents are avoidable, and that death is something that only happens to people who eat meat and smoke.
Jeremy Clarkson
#18. Negative personal attacks have no place in public life and serve to erode public confidence in our basic institutions of government.
Mike Pence
#19. Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.
Elmer Davis
#20. Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one's work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the 'venture of the public realm.
Hannah Arendt
#21. Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. Forster
#22. Help others and give something back. I guarantee you will discover that while public service improves the lives and the world around you, its greatest reward is the enrichment and new meaning it will bring your own life.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#23. William McKinley has left us a priceless gift in the example of a useful and pure life, in his fidelity to public trusts and in his demonstration of the value of kindly virtues that not only ennoble but lead to success.
Grover Cleveland
#24. 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.
Horace Mann
#25. Opening myself to criticism was a big door to go through. You can be afraid about something your whole life, about being out in public where people know your name but not you, and it can cripple your ability to try new things.
Peggy Rathmann
#26. Real estate sales was perfect training for the experience to go into public life because you learn to accept rejection, learn to meet new people, learn to work with people and find common ground. That's the way you sell houses ... that's also the way you win over constituency.
Johnny Isakson
#27. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.
Neil Postman
#28. The public has heard the stereotypical love songs a million times, and they've heard the stereotypical life-or-death songs millions of times. It's good to mix it up a little bit.
Ed Sheeran
#29. Sometimes I got scared of being too honest, because being in the public eye, I have always tried to hide my personal life. But I realized that isn't healthy.
Hilary Duff
#30. One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.
Theodore Dalrymple
#31. Though there are laws against blasphemy and insult to religion in many European countries, France has institutionalised its anti-clerical past by proscribing religion from public life.
Pankaj Mishra
#32. We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.
Theodore Dreiser
#33. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn't really know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down ... I was a very public failure.
Steve Jobs
#34. No one's personal life is in the public interest. It's gossip, bottom line. End of story.
Kevin Spacey
#35. It is by far the best plan, therefore, to mingle leisure with business, whenever chance impediments or the state of public affairs forbid one's leading an active life: for one is never so cut off from all pursuits as to find no room left for honorable action.
Seneca.
#36. 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
#37. I certainly do not support excluding faith from public life.
Safak Pavey
#38. I truly believe that women of my generation can bring a new cleansing element to American public life.
Georgie Anne Geyer
#39. 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
#40. I'm not one for a public display of my life.
Raven-Symone
#41. Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.
James A. Michener
#42. Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
E. M. Forster
#43. The Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life ... The Bible ... should be read in our schools in preference to all other books because it contains the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public happiness.
Benjamin Rush
#44. It's not from money that excellence comes, but from excellence money and the other things, all of them, come to be good for human beings, whether in private or in public life.
Plato
#45. For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.
Pankaj Mishra
#46. Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.
Samuel Beckett
#47. I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life I have never obstructed justice,
Richard M. Nixon
#48. I think one of the odd things about public life, coming from the outside, is that people seem to be paranoid. Maybe they were quite frank initially, but then they did one thing which went wrong.
Rory Stewart
#49. 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
#50. It was Mario Cuomo's great gift and our good fortune that he was both a sterling orator and a passionate public servant. His life was a blessing.
William J. Clinton
#51. Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity for
self-direction or the exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative.
Gustave Le Bon
#52. As humanism begins to dominate the state, the consequence is complete hostile annexation of the church or persecution by separation. Religion is then removed from the marketplace and the school, later from other domains of public life. The state will not toerlate any gods besides itself.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#53. I belong to the public. The public made me. The public can break me. I owe them my life.
Mickey Rooney
#54. I, who so love a hermit life for a good part of the day, find myself living in public, and almost losing my identity.
Elizabeth Blackwell
#55. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.
Antony Gormley
#56. Always try in interviews to avoid the cliches about the problems of public life.
Jack Nicholson
#57. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#58. The failure to invest in our public transportation and public life, I think, is a scandal and a shame, and it should be a national embarrassment.
Mark Shields
#59. I didn't want the public in my personal life at all - I thought that people might perceive me as too normal, and I'd lose that larger-than-life rock star persona. You've got to protect that!
Vanilla Ice
#60. My father worked for governments all his life as an engineer and public works director.
Edward Tufte
#61. And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare
#62. I had been overexposed in a particular way because my marriage to an extremely successful older man meant I was involved in his public life as well as my own.
Sarah Brightman
#63. You'd never catch me dancing on tables in public. I have no desire to be known for my personal life.
America Ferrera
#64. Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or life, with no fear of recourse or punishment.
Julie Wilson
#65. And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
Thomas Paine
#66. Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.
Joseph Campbell
#67. The importance of pedestrian public spaces cannot be measured, but most other important things in life cannot be measured either: Friendship, beauty, love and loyalty are examples. Parks and other pedestrian places are essential to a city's happiness.
Enrique Penalosa
#68. Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you go, and fix it along the way ...
Paul Arden
#69. There's the part of my life that the public and I share together. And there's the part that's mine to keep for myself. And that's mine. For me.
Queen Latifah
#70. I just think that your private life is private. What I do is obviously public, I get that. I get the fact that people are interested. I'm interested in a lot of people as well. I've just chosen to stay as private as possible.
Derek Jeter
#71. The hardest thing about being at Sony was not the travel; it was being divorced from the public and private life I had in New York. Travelling as much as I did, while I didn't lose connection with my friends, I lost a sense of belonging.
Howard Stringer
#72. It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
Billy Collins
#73. It has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public,
Solomon Northup
#74. It's easy for people to be characterized in public life based upon their personality, and I have a very direct, blunt personality. And I understand why some people would then characterize that, especially people who don't like you, as bullying, but it's not that.
Chris Christie
#75. Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail.
Russell Kirk
#76. Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
Hannah Arendt
#77. Hilary Clinton's great sin was that she left the nicely wallpapered domestic sphere with a slam of the door, took up public life on her own, leaving big feminist footprints all over the place, and without so much as an apology.
Patricia J. Williams
#78. Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.
Brooks Atkinson
#79. I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction.
George Washington
#81. If one of my boys was asking me if they should go into politics, I'd say there's only one reason to go into public life and that's to help people.
Evan Bayh
#82. In the event of fire in any of the public buildings troops would be of vast service in the protection of public property, and should insurrection break out the protection of life and property would be more safe guarded by our company of regulars, than by the whole City.
Thomas L. Smith
#83. You'll have to learn that public life takes a lot of sweat. But it doesn't need to worry you. You won't always be right, but you musn't suffer from being wrong.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#84. Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.
Emanuel Celler
#85. The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.
Fannie Flagg
#86. Unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quit a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties
George Washington
#87. For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books.
Avi
#88. Sometimes it's interesting to see something that you're not used to seeing, which is the main ingredient of life, and it's removed from the usual entertainment. I think it's important to give the opportunity to people to witness the life of somebody who was not public.
Michel Gondry
#89. Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
Barry Commoner
#90. In 1984, Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to serve as a legislative intern in his office in Washington, D.C. Coming from humble beginnings, the experience changed my life and charted me on a path of public service.
Brian Sandoval
#91. Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service ...
Peggy Noonan
#92. There are epic downsides to living a somewhat public life. The upshot of that is there's nothing to hide. It's a relief in a way. There's nothing about me that can't be said.
Natasha Lyonne
#93. I really see the vocation of politics like I see every vocation - whether it's being a reporter or serving in public life or being a plumber - as an extension of ministry.
Kevin Cramer
#94. The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life
Adolf Hitler
#95. As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me ... And now the work's done, there's only death.
Leo Tolstoy
#96. I never aimed to be on television or in the press. We all have a personal life, and being a public figure disrupts that.
Valentina Tereshkova
#97. We had representatives of most every ethnic group in the public school, and I always felt that this gave me a sense of balance about those ethnic problems that was useful to me in later life, and particularly in political life.
Prescott Bush
#98. So many people supported me through my public life and I will never forget them.
Princess Diana
#99. The number of those who do selfless public service and those who serve without expecting any return, should increase. Their sterling qualities should show the way to the people at large. Their life would be a model to show how man should conduct himself in public life.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#100. Your life changes. Everything has to be done perfectly, and I didn't follow that. I lived my life as if I wasn't in the public eye. I thought, 'I'm young. I have the right to experience new things, and if I want to go to a bar and get drunk, that's my prerogative.'
Shannen Doherty
