Quotes about public

The public is wiser than the wisest critic.

— George Bancroft

You're not an M.P., you're a gastronomic pimp.

— Aneurin Bevan

The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.

— Andre Breton

I'm not a very gregarious person. I can't bear attention being called to me in a public place, which is ridiculous in a business that pays you to be noticed.

— Gabriel Byrne

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called significant literature will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

— Raymond Chandler

I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.

— Charlie Chaplin

The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.

— Noam Chomsky

The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.

— Ramsey Clark

A man in public life expects to be sneered at -- it is the fault of his elevated situation, and not of himself.

— Charles Dickens

The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that or any other consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice, is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant.

— Edward Gibbon

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiless, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.

— William Hazlitt

I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.

— Jesse Jackson

The Public is a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

— John Keats

I never know when I press these whether I am going to blow up Massachusetts or start the project.

— John F. Kennedy

The public seldom forgive twice.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.

— Abraham Lincoln

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

— H. L. Mencken

The worthiest man to be known, and for a pattern to be presented to the world, he is the man of whom we have most certain knowledge. He hath been declared and enlightened by the most clear-seeing men that ever were; the testimonies we have of him are in faithfulness and sufficiency most admirable.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

— Richard M. Nixon

If you have got the public in the palm of your hand, you can be sure that is where they want to be.

— Cliff Richard

It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.

— George Bernard Shaw

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

— Source Unknown

Yes; the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

— Oscar Wilde

The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

— Oscar Wilde

For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

— Virginia Woolf