Public Quotations | Page 4

I dropped out of high school three days into my senior year because I hated it because New York City public school is a mess. I certainly wasn't one for sitting in a classroom. Then I went off to college to North Carolina School of the Arts, then quit that after two years.

Nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe... and it worries me.

My public school teachers did a great job of saying, 'Check this out. You're qualified for this. You should explore these opportunities.' They're the ones who said, 'You know, apply to Harvard. You might be a good fit here.'

There's a tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps.

Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.

We moved from the East coast to the town of Spokane, Washington, when I was about 13 years old, and I did not adapt very well to the, to the style of the place, and I spent most of my time in the public library.

What the public hates the most is when they think the politicians aren't listening to them. They understand that we can't solve all their problems with a snap of our fingers, but they sure want us to try because we are public servants.

Respect public investors and treat them as partners and important constituents.

Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

In every house, when the curtains are drawn, there's a story going on, and you never get to hear... You get the public side of things, the happy, smiling, social activities.

The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

During the early 1960s, I decided to supplement research support for quantitative economic studies at Pennsylvania by selling econometric forecasts to private and public sector buyers.

I was born and raised in California and benefited from California's excellent public schools, from kindergarten through medical school.

The United States is considered a puritanical society by many Western nations. For example, they can't believe we hassle public servants like General David Petraeus because he had a mistress. In France, if a powerful man doesn't have a mistress, he's considered a wimp.

We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.

My reputation was built on hostility. I had no friends and some very virulent enemies in the old-guard art scene when I began. They threw their heavy artillery against me. They were convinced I was perverting the public taste.

Going public is 18-month process, while an acquisition is a 6-month process. Going public means going under so much scrutiny, regulatory approval, auditing, magnified 10 times. Having the stomach to do that isn't necessarily in my DNA. My DNA is building a product and a service.

Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation.

If you work in a public space, you have to be aware that no one is buying a ticket.

I think that people post to social media to help shape their public identity.

The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance.

One of the first things a British visitor to Southern California discovers is that he must have a car. Freeways. Bad public transport. I took driving lessons.

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.

He was a fantastic player, but the thing that impressed me most about Paul was his manner off the pitch. He was always very humble about his achievements and had a lot of time for the paying public and people in general.

There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

Even during my youth, I can recall very few black people living on any kind of public assistance. People were working, doing some kind of job that was useful to the community.

I want my kids to be in an environment where they can talk about values in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting.

However vile the abuse they receive, media people must remember this is part of the price of getting a public voice. Stay grateful. Don't kick down, kick up. Criticise power rather than proles.

Teapot Dome involved the conservation of the oil resources of the United States, especially those situated upon the public lands.

Notre Dame and Sydney - that was nothing. Notre Dame doesn't have a police station; it is not 1,000 or so feet high. It was a public structure, very easy to access. And Sydney Harbour Bridge was half-and-half: a bridge, in the middle of the night. The World Trade Center was the end of the world. Electronic devices, police dogs.

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.

Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations.

What the American public thinks is very important to the future of global health. Many people are moved by the idea that there is unnecessary suffering in the world, and we could do a lot to stop it. We have the technologies necessary to stop most of the suffering.

It used to be that in comedy you had to play the clubs and work your way up, but now, before you do the clubs, you can put something up on the Internet. It's public access times a million.

Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the seat in which each person should sit during public worship.

I'm afraid I'm still trying to find that balance. Especially now that everyone wants a piece of me. I find that I have to become more and more reclusive, and pick and choose when I am public and when I am private.

Some people are probably scratching their heads and saying, How did that happen? That's because some of the media didn't give the public the full story.

That's what is always fascinating about racism - how it is allowed, if not encouraged, to flourish freely in public spaces, the way racism and bigotry are so often unquestioned.

I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And we should label them because there's absolutely nothing to hide.

I owed Lewis one thing, at least. Once you had suffered the experience of presenting a case at one of his Monday morning conferences, no other public appearance, whether on radio, TV or the lecture platform, could hold any terrors for you.

Sometimes I, as a public official, turn to Scripture or hymns - especially hymns, because sometimes we Catholics don't have the Scriptures memorized like we should - to help me explain a public policy position or an idea or to be able to articulate it better when you're talking about justice or mercy or compassion.

There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.

I have never seen Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, or Reed Hastings complain about being public. Nor have they ever argued that being public prevented them from doing things with a long-term focus.

We need to end the government monopoly in education by transferring power from bureaucracies and unions to families. The era of defining public education as allegiance to centralized school districts must end.

It is only fair to expect public employees like me and others in the public sector to pay something close to what our neighbors and our fellow citizens do in the private sector.

Unfortunately, the world pays attention when the media shines a light on those in need, which is why it's so important that we maintain the global public will that is necessary to meet the needs of those we serve.

To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.

I love every type of martial arts, but with Muay Thai in general, I want to see it being brought to the public more. There is no movie that has Muay Thai incorporated into it, so I want to bring that to the public.

Providing better computer science education in public schools to kids, and encouraging girls to participate, is the only way to rewrite stereotypes about tech and really break open the old-boys' club.

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

I left Facebook after Facebook groups began appearing about me and suddenly your personal photographs start becoming public property.

Families have become models for public life, constructing friendships between individuals of different temperaments, ambitions and ages, even if they are often unsuccessful. People now want, above all, appreciation of their uniqueness.

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea, getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way.

The tension between public and private science is powerful.

Lady Bird Johnson did more than plant flowers in public places. She served the country superbly by planting environmental values in the minds of the nation's leaders and citizens.

I'm an orphan. But the public has adopted me, and that has been my only family. The biggest family in the world is my fans.

The discussion about energy options tends to be an intensely emotional, polarised, mistrustful, and destructive one. Every option is strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal, anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrages, anti-carbon-tax, and anti-nuclear.

The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think science can do anything, and those who are afraid it will.

Certainly, my advice is that communicating, lobbying, fundraising and engaging the public in policy and politics is far more exciting and inexpensive via the Internet. Old guard organizations like Common Cause had to evolve to embrace this new environment.

The strange thing is, no matter what, when you become some kind of public figure, you have your go-to answers for all scenarios and instances.

All of us who are convinced that our military needs all the support the government and public will provide are pleased that he will have his chance to do just that.

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.

Whether I'm reading a national publication or one of my local Chicago newspapers, I don't need to turn too many pages before I stumble upon another scandal. Not only do ethics violations deteriorate the public trust, but they also disrupt and undermine legitimate debate and policy.

But the real growth I must say in terms of the public sector for the Labor Department is really at state and local levels. That's where the real opportunities are today.

The public lands are a public stock, which ought to be disposed of to the best advantage for the nation.

Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.

For all the popularity of spiritual advisers in South Korea, it still shocks to see the leaders of huge public companies relying on fortune-tellers. A shaman may advise a struggling executive to move a building's front entrance, tapping the widespread pungsu belief that your luck depends on the direction of your house.

Despite the painful changes we have had to make, we continue to believe in the St. Louis market. And we are hoping to add flights, in a careful way, as the economics of our business improve and the demands of the traveling public in St. Louis become clear.

Good people can disagree - all you want is honesty, because you know, if I disagree, I'm willing to debate you on that, and then let the public decide what's good policy and bad policy.

Of course, my faith has a lot to do with being able to be public without being a public nuisance.

If you're playing the a historical character that's in the public consciousness, then obviously you've got to make an effort to look like that person and there's a huge amount of historical record there that you have to kind of comply to.

Ronald Reagan's legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand.

The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.

This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem.

When words I uttered, believing them to be true, were exposed as false, I was constrained by my duties and loyalty to the President and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story of what I knew.

We can all agree that government can't solve the obesity crisis alone. It's an ongoing issue that will require a collaborative effort across private and public sectors if we want to see some long-term success.

We know that the airports are not protected as they should be protected. The terminals are public areas, wide open - anyone can go and walk at any terminal he wants.

Unfortunately, I think it's very difficult to separate policy from politics. In a perfect world, in some instances, you probably would want to. In other instances, you'd probably say that the political element is important because it should, in a perfect world, match what the stakeholders need or want, or what the public is after.

I'm truly glad I've managed to get the public interested in questions about basic research.

I'm a Vietnam veteran. I was here when there was no public support, not just for the effort in Vietnam, for the mission in Vietnam, but for our men and women in uniform.

Work done illegally outdoors or without permission feels like pure freedom to me. I understand how it can upset many in our society, but in the bigger picture, it is ultimately about freedom. We are living in a time where public space has become a commodity for corporations to control and dictate what is seen and heard.

Public office must not be a means to profit or become rich.

I want to tell you ladies and gentlemen, the actions that we took were not always easy. The actions that we took were not always popular. But when you get yourself in public office, you must lead, you must do what's necessary.

Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.

There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.

We were the first small American jazz group since Sidney Bechet in 1927 to play for the public in Moscow and Leningrad.

I went to public school, elementary through high school. I went to homecoming, to football games, pep rallies, I got detention, I got an F. I've done it all.

Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism strip education of its public values, critical content, and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to consumerism, risk-free relationships, and the destruction of the social state.

I know terrorism is real. And I know fear of it distorts public judgment. Terrorism is like a chronic illness. We have to learn to contain it and live with it.

It turns out that understanding the British public is not rocket science. The British appreciate honesty and they also have a bonkers, off-the-wall sense of humour like me.

Students and postdoctoral fellows largely depend on the support of the public sector to finance the training and research that will make them world-renowned scientists.

The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private interests.

Whenever I organize or participate in public protest I get really worried that it will just suck, be really small, embarrassing, and the media will laugh at me. Oftentimes, it is really small and most of the time the media laughs at us.

We know there is real interest from the American public in having easy access to the new, affordable choices in the Health Insurance Marketplace.

We must have the time to create strict rules so that property is not sold by Communist managers for a low price. They often get payments under the table to sell to the first bidder. This does not build public support for a market economy.

I just feel like the days of a handful of executives making the decisions for the entirety of the human public have gone on long enough.