Quotes About Public Officials

#1. I don't claim any moral or ethical high ground, but I also have chosen not to run for public office. Shouldn't there be a higher standard of conduct for public officials?

Mark McKinnon

#2. Scaremongering is an age-old political ritual. There are public officials who have benefited by playing up the 'hacker threat' so that they can win approval by cracking down on it.

Charles Platt

#3. Look, Americans will go for leadership that makes sense. Our job, you know, as public officials, is not to put our finger in the air. Our job is to listen, and then lead.

Barack Obama

#4. The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy.

Sandra Day O'Connor

#5. I am disturbed that the identification and clothing of our public officials is so easily reproduced.

Louise Slaughter

#6. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.

Rachel Carson

#7. Republicans always play the same game. They are for big business and money interests...We know from long experience that the people are better served by Democratic public officials, and we are letting the people down when we permit factional fighting to put Republicans in office.

Marc Sandalow

#8. Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#9. Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that ... may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

William J. Brennan

#10. In the coming days, I know there will be some reflecting on my time as mayor. Many of you will search to find what's behind my decision. It's simple. I have always believed that every person, especially public officials, must understand when it is time to move on. For me, that time is now.

Richard M. Daley

#11. For decades, the journalistic norm had been that the private lives of public officials remained private unless that life impinged on public performance.

Roger Mudd

#12. Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which ... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

Alan Greenspan

#13. The chief internal enemies of any state are those public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people.

Dalton Trumbo

#14. If we promise as public officials, we must deliver. If we as public officials propose, we must produce.

Barbara Jordan

#15. Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

Will Rogers

#16. It saddens me when public officials and bureaucrats are criticized for ulterior motives, none of which I have ever found in a government bureaucrat, or when someone personalizes disagreements.

Michael K. Powell

#17. We went across the South on Super Tuesday without a single catcall or boo, without a single ugly sign. Not until we got to New York and the North did the litmus test of race and religion spout from the mouths of public officials.

Jesse Jackson

#18. The safest course for public officials is simply to throw all of the money in a sack.

Dave Freudenthal

#19. Whether elected or appointed, public officials serve those who put and keep them in office. We cannot depend upon them to fight our battles.

Charles Hamilton Houston

#20. Public officials insult our intelligence and our goodwill when they paint rosy pictures about budgets, jobs, bipartisanship, and transparency, and alter their positions on issues simply to keep collecting their paycheck by never disagreeing or disappointing anyone.

Wendy E. Long

#21. I, George Bush, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the decade beginning January 1, 1990, as the Decade of the Brain. I call upon all public officials and the people of the United States to observe that decade with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.

George H. W. Bush

#22. People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them.

Ronald Reagan

#23. If you want to know the people of a nation, I am sure you can judge a great deal more about them from their cooking and eating traditions than you can from the words and actions of their public officials.

Peter Kropotkin

#24. Our public officials have forgotten that they are ultimately accountable to the people who put them in office, that the information they keep in secrecy belongs to all of us.

Yoko Ono

#25. I think one of the problems in this country is that too many people are screwing things up, committing crimes and then getting on with their lives. What is really needed for public officials who shame themselves is ritual suicide.

George Carlin

#26. More is required of public officials than slogans and handshakes and press releases. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision of the future.

Barbara Jordan

#27. In my experience, endorsements by public officials, they don't count for anything.

John Cornyn

#28. There is nothing new and nothing truthful in the false accusations against public officials make by the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation today, ... The simple reality is that the Schaghticoke fail to meet the criteria for federal recognition.

Richard Blumenthal

#29. I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.

George Mason

#30. In view of our public pledges, we public officials can never again go before the public merely promising election reform. The time for promises is past.

Charles Edison

#31. Public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. That is, they are permitted to engage in and live off, what in private dealings between private law subjects is prohibited and considered 'theft' and 'stolen loot.'

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

#32. A clear enunciation of these rights needs to be enshrined in the constitution to guarantee that this basic right of law-abiding gun owners and sportsmen shall not be infringed upon by anti-gun public officials.

Charlton Heston

#33. When it comes to our public services, decentralisation means giving power back to those on the front line - our doctors, nurses, teachers and physiotherapists, and our locally elected officials.

Charles Kennedy

#34. You know for many elected officials they all started in the same place. You know marriage is between a man and a woman, but they understand that they are moving inevitably, catching up to the American public.

James McGreevey

#35. Public corruption is the FBI's top criminal priority. The threat - which involves the corruption of local, state, and federally elected, appointed, or contracted officials - strikes at the heart of government, eroding public confidence and undermining the strength of our democracy.

James Comey

#36. State courts usually rule that correspondence between government officials, about government business, are public records, whether they use their government e-mail accounts or private ones.

Bill Dedman

#37. Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press. Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.

David Brock

#38. Unfortunately, too many public school officials believe that cameras are needed to enforce order and discipline.

Paul Weyrich

#39. When elected officials abandon our environment and ruin our natural resources, public health is endangered. I know the importance of providing a clean environment for our children; I have attended more than one funeral for a child who has died from an asthma attack.

Gwen Moore

#40. To restore and keep the public's confidence in the integrity of their government, state government and its officials must be open, honest and transparent.

John Lynch

#41. White House officials acknowledge in broad terms that a president's time and public rhetoric are among his most valuable policy tools.

Barton Gellman

#42. Despite being in public life, I value my own privacy immensely and would be as concerned as anyone else if I thought my mobile phone records could be easily available to officials across government.

David Blunkett

#43. These three brothers were not afforded the opportunity to defend themselves in a court of law. They were not given a fair and public trial. Paramilitaries, under the command of senior Ministry of Interior officials, denied them these rights and shot them in cold blood.

Garry Robbins

#44. The public is blaming the city officials, who in turn have to find someone else to blame. It's the nature of the beast. If the police, the politicians, can pass the buck on down the line, they will.

Patricia Cornwell

#45. Throughout the United States, at the dawn of the Progressive era, dozens of laws and regulations were established to empower police officers, public-health officials, and even the armed forces to vaccinate at will, and, if necessary, at gunpoint.

Michael Specter

#46. If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that's a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that's a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public.

Rachel Maddow

#47. I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society ... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

Sissela Bok

#48. Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.

Jimmy Carter

#49. The public wants elected officials who have character. The public wants elected officials who are willing to stand up and say things, even if they don't agree with them.

Michael Bloomberg

#50. The public is tired of politicians professing certain beliefs and not acting on those beliefs. They want elected officials who have the moral courage to do what they will say they will do when they're running for election.

Colonel Tom Parker

#51. For most mothers, vaccinations become a matter of faith - faith in pharmaceutical companies, faith in public health officials - and I think there's been an erosion of faith.

Paul A. Offit

#52. There needs to be a planned series of speeches, interviews, etc., over the next two or three months by administration officials and other public figures talking about President Ford, what he is trying to do and what he has accomplished.

Robert Teeter

#53. Is India's largest free public Wi-Fi network at Connaught Place (CP). Officials claim that once the free usage of 20 minutes is

Anonymous

#54. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.

Theodore Roosevelt

#55. The politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary incentive to care about serving the public properly and competently.

Murray Rothbard

#56. I'm convinced that unless you have some public financing of elections, you are never going to remove the power of wealthy interests over elected officials.

Dick Murphy

#57. In 1962, the Supreme Court banned organized prayer from public schools. Since then, federal, state, and local courts and officials, including public school administrators, have joined in a nationwide search and destroy mission for student religious practices.

Ralph E. Reed Jr.

#58. Though public pronouncements of Israeli officials emphasize peace and mutuality, unilateralism actually drives Israeli actions.

Douglas Feith

#59. You don't have to be an elected official to be a public servant.

William J. Clinton

#60. Truth-telling to Congress and the public is not disloyal in America: it is an expression of the higher loyalty officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the sovereign public. It is a courageous, patriotic, and effective way to serve our country. The time to speak out is now.

Daniel Ellsberg

#61. Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome.

Thomas E. Mann

#62. The public are entitled to have an absolute guarantee of the financial probity and integrity of their elected representatives, their officials and above all of Ministers. They need to know that they are under financial obligations to nobody.

Bertie Ahern

#63. One answer is that the town's elected officials thought that the project served a public purpose and that the various subsidies and favors were worth the price. But they may or may not have thought this.

Michael Kinsley

#64. Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

Thomas Frank

#65. A lot of these ideas are built under wrong presumptions which officials have that chess players are lazy bastards whose sole idea is to deceive (the) public and to make short draws and go home. It's not true. It's a lie.

Boris Gelfand

#66. Top IRS officials specifically targeted tea party groups and misled the public about its secret political targeting program led by ex-official Lois Lerner, according to a bombshell new congressional report.

Patrick Howley

#67. It appears that some school officials, teachers, and parents have assumed that religious expression of any type is either inappropriate or forbidden altogether in public schools; however, nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones.

William J. Clinton