Public Life Quotes - Page 9

• The First Amendment is now being used by the secularists of our day as a cattle prod to herd conservative religious people out of the public life of the nation and into, as others have put it, a religious ghetto.

  Pat Swindall

  Christian, Religious, Ghetto

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• 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

  Family, Leadership, Wisdom

  "MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry Offers Televised Apology for Romney Segment" by Erik Hayden, www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 04, 2014.

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• 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

  Apology, Doors, Feminist

  Patricia J. Williams (1997). “The Rooster's Egg”

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• The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob

  H. L. Mencken

  Lying, Way, Flattering

  H. L. Mencken (2009). “Prejudices: Third Series”, p.29, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Let me just say this, and I want to say this to the televison audience: I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service

  Richard M. Nixon

  Mistake, Years, Want

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• I really see the vocation of politics like I see every vocation - whether its being a reporter or serving in public life or being a plumber - as an extension of ministry.

  Kevin Cramer

  Ministry, Vocation, Plumber

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• advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework.

  Mary Frances Berry

  Mother, Children, Opportunity

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• There never was a woman so ill-suited to public life as I am. I have had to whip myself, as it were, into society, and the loneliness of it all has been terrific.

  Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

  Loneliness, Ill, Whips

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• 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

  Art, Mean, Alive

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• It's wonderful for me to see what 'We Will Rock You' has done. 'We Will Rock You' and 'We Are the Champions' have kind of transcended the normal framework of where music is listened to and appreciated - they've become part of public life, which I feel wonderful about.

  Brian May

  Rocks, Champion, Normal

  "Queen's Brian May Rocks Out To Physics, Photography". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. August 3, 2010.

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• By the very fact of public life, one seems to lose humanity in people's eyes.

  Abigail McCarthy

  Eye, People, Humanity

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• 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

  Education, Strong, Children

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• Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

  Hilary Mantel

  Mean, Dark, White

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• Tulsa has world-class opera and Starbucks, and a religious conservatism that rules public life.

  Anne Hull

  Religious, Class, Tulsa

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• There is a schizophrenic nature in modern politics. A leader is expected to have a religious faith but he is not supposed to let it influence him in his duties. Somehow, the truths that determine everything else about his existence are not allowed to influence how he conducts himself in public life. Not only that, his principles are usually considered so personal that the public is not even allowed to know for certain what they are. This passes for noble statecraft in our time. It was once thought cowardice.

  Stephen Mansfield

  Religious, Leader, Principles

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• We women are callow fledglings as compared with the wise old birds who manipulate the political machinery, and we still hesitate to believe that a woman can fill certain positions in public life as competently and adequately as a man. For instance, it is certain that women do not want a woman for President. Nor would they have the slightest confidence in her ability to fulfill the functions of that office. Every woman who fails in a public position confirms this, but every woman who succeeds creates confidence.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Wise, Believe, Men

  Eleanor Roosevelt (1995). “What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt”, Carlson Pub

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• Shrewdness in public life all over the world is always honored, while honesty in public men is generally attributed to dumbness and is seldom rewarded.

  Will Rogers

  Honesty, Men, World

  Will Rogers, Bryan B. Sterling, Frances N. Sterling (1993). “Will Rogers' World: America's Foremost Political Humorist Comments on the Twenties and Thirties--and Eighties and Nineties”, p.79, Rowman & Littlefield

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• The recommendation by the Arkansas Supreme Court Disciplinary Committee that President Clinton be disbarred is like a tender green shoot of integrity rising from the stinking junkyard of American public life. At last, some official body has come to a decision about Clinton's conduct that is untainted by politics, cowardice or cynicism.

  Mona Charen

  Integrity, Decision, President

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• I think credibility, irrespective of what you do, if you are in public life, then it is important.

  Rahul Dravid

  Thinking, Important, Credibility

  "Fixing has got to be a criminal offence". Interview with Sambit Bal, www.espncricinfo.com. August 6, 2013.

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• Obama is not just a powerful speaker, but a thinker engaged with the ideas of his country and his age--this argument by historian James Kloppenberg should therefore fascinate anyone interested in American politics or how ideas shape public life. Tracing the influences of Obama's family, educational, and work experiences on his ideas, Reading Obama locates a unique individual in the crosscurrents of American democracy and continuing fights over American ideals.

  Martha Minow

  Country, Powerful, Educational

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• The reflection and experience of many years have led me to consider the holy writings not only as the most authentic and instructive in themselves, but as the clue to all other history. They tell us what man is, and they alone tell us why he is what he is: a contradictory creature that seeing and approving of what is good, pursues and performs what is evil. All of private and public life is there displayed. ... From the same pure fountain of wisdom we learn that vice destroys freedom; that arbitrary power is founded on public immorality.

  Gouverneur Morris

  Writing, Reflection, Men

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• 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

  Adversity, Faces, Defeat

  "Disgraced Rep. Aaron Schock Compares Himself To Lincoln In Farewell Speech" by Laura Barron-Lopez, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 26, 2015.

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• I always felt, and I still feel, that the media doesn't belong in a public official's private life. It's a very difficult balance, because if you are elected to public office, people have a right to know a great deal about you, and the press has an absolute obligation to report all of that. But the reality is that there are times in which the reporting is really happening for almost voyeuristic reasons, in the gossip columns. Maybe half of it is wrong, and half of it is correct, and a lot of it is exaggerated. You've just got to get used to that if you're in public life.

  Rudy Giuliani

  Reality, Media, People

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• Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Character, Hands, Greed

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.418, OUP Oxford

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• The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been ... important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

  Law, Two, Perfect

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