Top 100 Public Life Quotes
#1. The web of influence which News Corporation spun in Britain, which effectively bent politicians, police and many others in public life to its will, amounted to a shadow state.
Thomas Watson Jr.
#2. No man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time
Plato
#3. A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten.
John F. Kennedy
#4. With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres.
Henry Giroux
#5. The abortion issue has intersected with my public life from the very beginning.
Robert Casey
#6. I try not to think about my public life. I focus on my private life, and that's just the best way to live.
Angelina Jolie
#7. People come into public life for different reasons. None of us are ego-challenged, I think, or we probably wouldn't be doing what we're doing, so if anyone tells you that they don't like the sound of the applause and the ego gratification, I don't think they're being straight with you.
Evan Bayh
#8. You know, I have found out in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me.
Calvin Coolidge
#9. A man made for public life and authority never takes account of personalities; he only takes account of things, of their weight and their conseqences.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#10. Until the Civil War there was scarcely a man in public life in New Orleans or Louisiana who had not fought at least one duel; most of them had engaged in several.
Herbert Asbury
#11. On the contrary, the characteristic element of the present situation is that economic questions have finally and irrevocably invaded the domain of public life and politics.
Arthur Henderson
#12. Our ideology is intolerant ... and peremptorily demands ... the complete transformation of public life to its ideas.
Adolf Hitler
#13. To have a public life, you still have the right to a private life.
Catherine Deneuve
#14. Teens are desperate to have access to and make sense of public life; understanding the technologies that enable publics is just par for the course.
Danah Boyd
#15. It would be unthinkable in Canadian public life today for the public inauguration of our supreme political figures to be accompanied by prayer.
Stockwell Day
#16. We need to build websites with celebrity speakers who talk about the ideals of fairness, sharing, democratic cooperation, and altruism in public life.
Deepak Chopra
#17. I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.
Patti Smith
#18. There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.
George Eliot
#19. You hope people won't be tricky or miserable. If you're in public life, it's important not to be. If someone says, 'I like your programme, thank you,' you should be grateful. I am. Why be nasty?
Alan Titchmarsh
#20. I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
Rebecca Solnit
#21. I keep my family out of my public life because it can be an awful nuisance to them. What's my mother going to tell strangers anyway? That I was a cute baby and that she's terribly proud of me? Nuts. Who cares?
Montgomery Clift
#22. We talk about politicians being in public life, but they seldom appear in the public space where everyone is free to appear as a citizen.
Rebecca Solnit
#23. I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man.
Thomas Jefferson
#24. The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob
H.L. Mencken
#25. The Christian church in the U.S. is still strong numerically, but it has lost its decisive influence both in American public life and in American culture as a whole, especially in the major elite institutions of society.
Os Guinness
#26. Today's secular libertarians, who want to remove biblical religion from public life, have trouble making sense of the civil rights movement because it was so clearly a religiously inspired movement that entered the public arena and made a major difference in American life.
Bruce L. Shelley
#27. I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn't work out that way.
Charles Van Doren
#28. I was motivated to go into public life because of the great chasm that exists between justice and injustice in our country. Nowhere is that divide greater than in America's cities.
Martin O'Malley
#29. I've always told the truth. I've often been wrong - but I've never knowingly lied. Not in public life. Because I don't see the need to.
Ken Livingstone
#30. Naturalism attempts to fortify itself against God by altogether shutting Him out of public life, social policy, the courts, and eliminating all biblical influence in morality and ethics.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#31. A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.
Michael Sandel
#32. American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.
Chester Himes
#33. Unfortunately, love and compassion have been omitted from too many spheres of social interaction for too long. Usually confined to family and home, their practice in public life is considered impractical, even naive. This is tragic.
Dalai Lama
#34. Involvement in public life provides the opportunity to shape our manners in accordance with civil justice.
John Calvin
#35. Taking a toddler to school is one of the most satisfying moments in my many years in public life. There is no better joy than laying the foundations of a strong future for these little children ... Friends, let us all become partners in this quest for ensuring education for all!
Narendra Modi
#36. Having a Christian worldview shapes my decision-making with respect to all aspects of my life. I always respect people in public life who are principled, and those principles have to be connected to something. And my faith is what serves as the anchor and directs my actions.
John Thune
#37. I have been for some time in Retirement, and shall not probably return again to public Life; yet my Anxiety for my Country, in these Times of Danger, makes me sometimes dabble a little in Politicks, and keep up a Correspondence with some Men upon the public Stage.
George Mason
#38. When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.
Pope Pius XI
#39. America was founded on prayer. Therefore, the removal of prayer from its public life was a central part of its fall from God. A nation that turns away from prayer will ultimately find itself in desperate need of it.
Jonathan Cahn
#40. He who doesn't know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs.
Anton Chekhov
#41. Private and public life are subject to the same rules-truth and manliness are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better than policy or tact of expediency or other words that were devised to conceal a deviation from a straight line.
Robert E.Lee
#42. If we are to celebrate the giants in Australian public life, then Robert Garran must be among them. A lawyer and passionate advocate of Federation, Garran was one of several hands that drafted our constitution.
Anthony Albanese
#43. the Stoics had always approved of participation in public life, and this stand struck a chord with the Roman aristocracy, whose code of values placed a premium on political and military activity.
Marcus Aurelius
#44. At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"?
Peggy Noonan
#45. By the very fact of public life, one seems to lose humanity in people's eyes.
Abigail McCarthy
#46. There is an honourable tradition in British public life that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation. I am therefore writing to the prime minister today to tender my resignation as chairman of the BBC.
Gavyn Davies
#47. I don't think public life in and of itself can destroy you. I think it's the way people react to it, and some people are more sturdy than others ... I don't think any one faction can be blamed for a person's self destruction - a certain amount of that has to be innate.
Patti Smith
#48. So the controversy over Duck Dynasty sends a clear signal to anyone who has anything to risk in public life: Say nothing about the sinfulness of homosexual acts or risk sure and certain destruction by the revolutionaries of the new morality. You have been warned.
Albert Mohler
#49. The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus.
Ray Oldenburg
#50. I've also said you don't rule any options out, because if you are in public life because you want to make a difference ... obviously, you have to be open to those kind of possibilities.
John Thune
#51. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.
Neal Stephenson
#52. Publicity, publicity, publicity is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life.
Joseph Pulitzer
#53. This communal parenting brought me out of the privacy of our foreign enclave and into the public life of the community. Here, parenting was everyone's responsibility; all adults were "aunties" and "uncles".
Aminta Arrington
#54. Today, more than ever, citizens demand with good reason that moral and ethical principles be upheld and that exemplariness preside over our public life. And the king, as the head of state, must not only be an example but also a servant to that just and legitimate demand of the citizens.
King Felipe VI
#56. Anyone in public life who comes out, comes out primarily for themselves, and their life is immediately improved. That's what happened to me.
Ian McKellen
#57. As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.
George H. W. Bush
#58. We pretend that our present system is democratic, yet the people never have the chance nor the means to express their views on any problem of public life. Any issue that does not pertain to particular interests is abandoned to collective passions, which are systematically and officially inflamed.
Simone Weil
#59. A politician who enters public life may as well face the fact that the best way of not being found out is not to do anything which, if found out, will cause his ruin.
Lord Hailsham
#60. My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.
Christopher Hitchens
#61. These manly sentiments, in private life, make good citizens; in public life, the patriot and the hero.
James Otis
#62. Adults who enter into public life implicitly consent to having less privacy, but their families - especially their children - should not be treated callously or thoughtlessly.
Melissa Harris-Perry
#63. I'm not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.
Jonathan Dee
#64. I thought making speeches for money was a much better thing than getting connected with any one group or company, as so many people who leave public life do.
Hillary Clinton
#65. My point, though, is that if lines have indeed shifted, it's not so much that the younger generation just doesn't care, it's that we have ceded more and more of our public life over to the private sector. If you grow up with advertising at school, you have come of age in a sold-out world.
Astra Taylor
#66. You've only got to be in public life for about a week before you start to question if the newspapers are even giving you today's date with any accuracy!
Jonathan Lynn
#67. I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles.
Thomas Jefferson
#68. I try to protect my loved ones, the people I share my life with, because they don't have a public life like me. I want to keep their lives private out of respect for them.
Georges St-Pierre
#69. I think that language matters. I think that people who are in public life have an opportunity to help the public understand issues and understand the urgency of issues. And to that extent, I think it is important how issues are talked about.
Maya Harris
#70. If you look at the practice of 'crisis management,' and maybe squint at it a little, you can make out in the corners of your vision the ghosts or the vestiges of a much older, but still thoroughly American, form of public life, one centered not on public opinion but on religion.
Jonathan Dee
#71. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life.
Seymour Hersh
#72. The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.
Richard Rodriguez
#73. Public life in this country is too damn dominated by people who'd read more if only their lips didn't get so tired.
Markham Shaw Pyle
#74. I also know that every person faces adversity in life. Abraham Lincoln held this seat in Congress in one term. But few faced as many defeats in his personal, business and public life as he did,
Aaron Schock
#75. If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.
Richard Dawkins
#76. Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.
Charles Colson
#77. My father was a great innovator in public life, but when it came to raising his daughters, no one could have been more conservative.
Rose Kennedy
#78. The truth was you can't continue to spend the kind of money our spending on all these entitlement programs. I think we need more people in public life who are willing to say, no, we can't afford certain things. No, we can't do certain things.
Chris Christie
#79. To be fair, lying is part and parcel of public life. Every politician has lied about something because they are owned by the special interest groups that finance their elections.
Peter Schuyler
#80. What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.
Timothy Snyder
#81. I've always thought that there shouldn't be any limit to the things that are well designed. And I think that people who consider that art should only be kept for art galleries and doesn't have a role in public life, I think that's too narrow.
Ken Done
#82. It is to be regretted that few persons who have arrived at any degree of eminence or fame, have written Memorials of themselves, at least such as have embraced their private as well as their public life.
Adam Clarke
#83. Public life has become so gladiatorial. Every day, another reputation bites the dust.
Tina Brown
#84. Turkey is immersed in a profound social and political conflict between secularists, who have been in power since the republic was founded, and an insurgent Islamic-based movement that seeks to increase the role of religion in public life.
Stephen Kinzer
#85. Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life must grow.
Jane Jacobs
#86. Several things about Reagan are unusual in a public man. He was not a typical politician at all, but a private man in public life.
Lyn Nofziger
#87. When you want to know something about the character of somebody in public life, look to see if they have a passion that began long before they were in office and that they have consistently held it throughout their career.
Tim Kaine
#88. Tulsa has world-class opera and Starbucks, and a religious conservatism that rules public life.
Anne Hull
#89. You have your private life and you have your public life, and just don't let them interfere.
Heather Matarazzo
#90. The Princess's so-called 'time and space speech' at the end of '93 about a year after the formal separation, looking back on it it's called her retirement from public life but we've seen in fact it's nothing of the kind.
Anthony Holden
#91. This book [Dreams from My Father] was more of a reflection on my public life, now as a U.S. senator and before that as a state senator; how my perspectives around the issues of the day are shaped by my background.
Barack Obama
#92. You know, when you're in public life, everything you do is out there. But I am proud to stand on my record.
Dick Gephardt
#93. It's hard to think of anything that is more socially beneficial than raising children well. It needs to be valued and respected, I believe by everyone in public life regardless of your political party.
Kerry Healey
#94. That's good advice for any young person to remember who aspires to leadership in corporate or public life. Develop a thick skin when it comes to the press. Remember you're never as bad-or as good-as the press says you are.
William Schreyer
#95. We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.
Ludwig Von Mises
#96. It is the task of theologians to establish the limits of justice and injustice regarding the intrinsic goodness or wickedness of an act; it is the task of the observer of public life to establish the relationships of political justice and injustice, that is, of what is useful or harmful to society.
Cesare Beccaria
#97. I think it will be very challenging for someone who has not been in prominent public life in the age of Twitter to go out on the campaign trail.
Daniel Pfeiffer
#98. The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
#99. We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#100. In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.
Paul Keating
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
