Great Throughts Treasury

"Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age." - Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton

"A statesman should follow public opinion as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins, and guiding them." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

"A statesman should follow public opinion as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins, and guiding them." -

"He who puts a friend to public shame is as guilty as a murderer." -

"The aging man of the middle twentieth century lives, not in the public world of atomic physics and conflicting ideologies, of welfare states and supersonic speed, but in his strictly private universe of physical weakness and mental decay." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man." - William Ralph Inge

"The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public." -

"The seeds of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public." -

"The [Supreme] Court’s only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society." - Irving Robert Kaufman

"The basis of effective government is public confidence." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"We are making the price of power much too high in this society. I worry that we are making the conditions of public life so tough that nobody except people really obsessed with power will be willing finally to pay that price. That would be tragic from the point of view of public well-being." - Jeane Kirkpatrick

"Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice." - Abraham Lincoln

"Politicians tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism which describes him." - Walter Lippmann

"Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people." - Walter Lippmann

"In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals." -

"Yet it is meet and proper that a nation should set apart an annual day for national giving of thanks. It is a public recognition of God as the Author of all prosperity. It is the erection of a memorial to the honor of him who has led us through another year. The annual proclamations which call to the duty of thanksgiving are calculated to remind the people of their indebtedness to God, to stir in their minds and hearts emotions of gratitude and praise, and to call out thanks and sincere worship which otherwise might not find expression. But if the observance of the day be not marked by real remembering of mercies and by real lifting of hearts to God in thanks, what blessing can possibly come with it?" -

"The [doctor] has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease." -

"It takes a lot of self-love and presumption to have such esteem for one’s own opinions that to establish them one must overthrow the public peace and introduce so many inevitable evils, and such a horrible corruption of morals, as civil wars and political changes bring with them in a matter of such weight - and introduce them into one’s own country." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Those who give the first shock to a state are naturally the first to be overwhelmed in its ruin. The fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by the man who was the first to set it a going; he only troubles the water for another’s net." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Extensive moralizing within the ecological movement has given the public the false impression that they are being asked to make a sacrifice - to show more responsibility, more concern, and a nicer moral standard. But all of that would flow naturally and easily if the self were widened and deepened so that the protection of nature was felt and perceived as protection of our very selves." - Arne Dekke Eide Naess

"The media are far more powerful than the President in creating public awareness and shaping public opinion, for the simple reason that the media always have the last word." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power." - Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley

"Public opinion is compounded by folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs." - Robert Peel, fully Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet

"There is no tyranny so despotic as that of public opinion among a free people." - Donn Piatt

"You should not live one way in private, and another in public." - Publius Syrus

"Demean thyself more warily in thy study than in the street. If thy public actions have a hundred witnesses, thy private have a thousand. The multitude looks but upon thy actions; thy conscience looks into them: the multitude may chance to excuse thee, if not acquire thee; thy conscience will accuse thee, if not condemn thee." - Francis Quarles

"Commerce tends to wear off prejudices which maintain destruction and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them by one of the strongest of all ties - the desire of supplying their mutual wants. It disposes them to peace by establishing in every state an order of citizens bound by their interest to be the guardians of public tranquillity." -

"Never utter a word in private which you would regret to have heard in public." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"Egotism erects its center in itself: love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing public, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view of a martyr’s crown - indifferent whether the reward is tin this life or in the next." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"No man is nobler born than another, unless he is born with better abilities and more amiable disposition. They who make such a parade with their family pictures, and pedigrees, are, properly speaking, rather to be called noted or notorious than noble persons. I thought it right to say this much, in order to repel the insolence of men who depend entirely upon chance and accidental circumstances for distinction, and not at all on public services and personal merit." -

"He that does as well in private between God and his own soul as in public, hath given himself a testimony that his purposes are full of honesty, nobleness, and integrity." - Jeremy Taylor

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasure, with the result that a democracy collapses over loose fiscal policy." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." -

"The noblest motive is the public good." -

"Public opinion is stronger than the Legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments." - Charles Dudley Warner

"Authority is properly the servant of justice, and political powers are arbitrary and illegitimate if not based upon qualification for that service. This is the doctrine of the ethical derivation of authority or public power, as opposed to that of an unconditioned and inherent sovereignty." - David Atwood Wasson

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius." -

"The man whom neither riches nor luxury nor grandeur can render happy may, with a book in his hand, forget all his troubles under the friendly shade of every tree, and may experience pleasures as infinite as they are varied, as pure as they are lasting, as lively as they are unfading, and as compatible with every public duty as they are contributory to private happiness." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

"If the meaning of life is not a mystery, if leading meaningful lives is within the power of all of us, then we do not need to ask the question `What’s it all about?’ in despair. We can look around us and see the many ways in which life can be meaningful. We can see the value of happiness while accepting that it is not everything, which will make it easier for us at those times when it eludes us. We can learn to appreciate the pleasure of life without becoming slaves to appetites which can never be satisfied. We can see the value of success, while not interpreting that too narrowly, so that we can appreciate the project of striving to become what we want to be as well as the more visible, public signs of success. We can see the value of seizing the day, without leading us into a desperate scramble to grasp the ungraspable moment. We can appreciate the value in helping others lead meaningful lives, too, without thinking that altruism demands everything we have. And finally, we can recognize the value of love, as perhaps the most powerful motivator to do anything at all." - Julian Baggini

"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself." - Roland Barthes, fully Roland Gérard Barthes

"Our American system of government by lobbyist guarantees us a form of taxation with representation that the founding father did not foresee: special interests get the representation while the broad public gets the taxation." - Alan Stuart Blinder

"When people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one." -

"Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the public." - Henry Clay

"The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces [him]; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments." - Henry Clay

"Novelists seldom write for a believing public; they take for granted that their readers will be as themselves, that is, human beings without a definite standard of morals, without preconceived conceptions of truth." - Martin D’Arcy, fully Fr. Martin Cyril D'Arcy

"We narratively represent our selves in part in order to answer certain questions of identity. It is useful to distinguish two different aims of self-representation that in the end are deeply intertwined. First, there is self-representation for the sake of self-understanding. This is the story we tell ourselves to understand ourselves for who we are. The ideal here is convergence between self-representation and an acceptable version of the story of our actual identity. Second, there is self-representation for public dissemination, whose aim is underwriting successful social interaction." - Owen Flanagan

"We are at ease with a moral judgment made against someone’s private sin - lust or greed. We are much less comfortable judging someone’s public ethic - those decisions that can lead to such outcomes as aggression, the abuse of the environment, the neglect of the needy." - Ellen Goodman

"I never… believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man." - Thomas Jefferson

"The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas." - John Kane, fully John L. Lane Jr.