Public Affairs Quotes - Page 2

• We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Ignorance, Track, Ignorant

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• I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

  Stephen King

  Believe, Book, Long

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.149, Simon and Schuster

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• Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.

  Iain Pears

  Philosophy, Teaching, Men

  Iain Pears (2003). “Dream of Scipio”, p.237, Penguin

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• It's no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do?.. Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.

  Golda Meir

  Heart, Laughing, What If

  Interview with Oriana Fallaci, Ms. Magazine, April 1973.

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• I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice or ambition, or even the desire of fame

  John Adams

  Jealousy, Ambition, Envy

  John Adams (1854). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.593

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• Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be.

  John Adams

  Abuse, Usual, Goes On

  John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Adams, Lester Jesse Cappon, Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) (1988). “The Adams-Jefferson letters: the complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams”, The University of North Carolina Press

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• Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them.

  Adam Smith

  Men, Giving, Desire

  Adam Smith, William Playfair (1811). “An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations”, p.102

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• I've been in entertainment, politics, business, business coaching, public affairs, documentaries, programming, news, theater. So, there aren't many things I see that I haven't seen something like that before.

  Roger Ailes

  Coaching, News, Documentaries

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• There's been an amazing backlash for the last decade in America: political correctness. In many ways, I think that, while we've been remarkably violent in our media, there's been a real schizophrenia. In private, on the Internet, and on public-affairs shows or talk radio, we're way more explicit than we've ever been. But traditional Hollywood has been much more frightened than it ever was in the '70s about presenting things that could be perceived as politically incorrect.

  Ivan Reitman

  Real, Thinking, Media

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

  Rebecca West

  Fate, Men, Cells

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.7, Open Road Media

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• General Taylor is, I have no doubt, a well-meaning old man. He is, however, uneducated, exceedingly ignorant of public affairs, and I should judge, of very ordinary capacity.

  James K. Polk

  Men, Judging, Doubt

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• Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.

  Bernard Crick

  Democracy, World, Affair

  Bernard Crick (1993). “In Defense of Politics”, p.56, University of Chicago Press

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• A lot of our fellow liberals ... seem to me rather to doom themselves to futility in public affairs because the won't recognize that there's a zone of natural affection midway between the inner, or family one, and the outer, or all-humanity one. I suppose they are somehow short of a zone themselves and they seem to get vexed... The common man knows better, just as he'd know better if some philosopher told him he ought not to make invidious distinctions by feeding his own children in preference to others. But of course he can't explain; he just ... goes on feeding the kids.

  Charles Edward Montague

  Children, Kids, Men

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• We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight. The product of their impassioned intervention in public affairs is more often confusion than lucidity.

  Conrad Black

  Commitment, Numbers, Views

  "A Brief to the Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media from the Sherbrooke Record". 1969.

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• The men who administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone holds onto what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public men.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Men, Firsts, Affair

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• An Athenian citizen does not neglect his state because he takes care of his own household; even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We do not regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs as harmless. We do not say that such a man 'minds his own business'. Rather we say he has no business here at all.

  Pericles

  Dark, Men, Ideas

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• Many people don't give a rip about politics and know as much about public affairs as they know about the topography of Pluto.

  Tony Snow

  Rip, People, Giving

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• No man should ever lose sleep over public affairs.

  Harold MacMillan

  Sleep, Men, Affair

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• A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.

  J. Courtney Sullivan

  Mother, Children, Kids

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• We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

  Walter Lippmann

  Affair, Concerned

  Walter Lippmann (2012). “Public Opinion”, p.31, Courier Corporation

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• Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not I should miss the stimulus of living in a society where I have, at least theoretically, some part in the direction of public affairs.

  Learned Hand

  Fate, Missing, Would Be

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• Hence as a private man has a right to say what wages he will give in his private affairs, so has a Community to determine what they will give and grant of their substance for the Administration of public affairs.

  Samuel Adams

  Men, Giving, Community

  John White, Cecil Calvert Baltimore (2d Baron), Charles Hudson, Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson, Massachusetts Historical Society (1904). “The planting of colonies in New England”

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• In public affairs men are often better pleased that the truth, though known to everybody, should be wrapped up under a decent cover than if it were exposed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world.

  David Hume

  Eye, Men, World

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.1807, Delphi Classics

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• And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Integrity, Writing, Thinking

  Lawrence Lessig (2009). “Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy”, p.96, A&C Black

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• The public affairs of the union are spread throughout a very extensive region, and are extremely diversified by the local affairs connected with them, and can with difficulty be learnt in any other place, than in the central councils, to which a knowledge of them will be brought by the representatives of every part of the empire. Yet some knowledge of the affairs, and even of the laws of all the states, ought to be possessed by the members from each of the states.

  James Madison

  Law, Federalism, Unions

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2012). “Selected Federalist Papers”, p.127, Courier Corporation

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