Public Decency Quotes

There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I always wanted to be an outrage to public decency and a threat to women. And this is one of the few occupations where you're not only allowed that, but you're encouraged. ~ David Lee Roth

Public opinion takes no offense at the endeavors of farmers, workers, clerks, teachers, doctors, ministers, and people from many other callings to earn as much as they can. But it censures the capitalists and entrepreneurs for their greed. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Merlin seemed really relaxed and lackadaisical for a cat who had just transported through a public restroom into Magic Central and been met by a ghoul at the door. ~ Elizabeth A. Reeves

Though they control scores of industrial, commercial, mining and tourist corporations, not one bears the name Rothschild. Being private partnerships, the family houses never need to, and never do, publish a single public balance sheet, or any other report of their financial condition. ~ Frederic Morton

Colleges and departments of education have developed in response to the need for preparing the tens of thousands of teachers required to staff our immense public school system. That they have a most important function to discharge is plain for all to see. But instead of seeing that their products are equipped with sound learning in the various arts and sciences, they have ignored this and have concentrated almost exclusively upon methods of education. They have erected pseudo-science called "Education," most of whose courses are made up of commonplaces expressed in pretentious jargon. ~ Richard Weaver

Wherever wolves run free, indigenous cultures have revered them as symbols of loyalty, free will, fearlessness and unity. But wolves haven't had it easy in North America, where negative myths prevail. Fear-based stereotypes and use of public lands for cattle ranching have resulted in Mother Nature's dogs being aggressively persecuted to the point of near extinction. ~ Zoe Helene

There is a possibility of fresh talent coming to work for the government. Millennials are the most public-spirited generation since the 1960s. There is an opportunity to harness that generation and make government service cool again. ~ Tim O'Reilly

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word 'lost' comes from the old Norse 'los' meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest. ~ Rebecca Solnit

There were moments of racial unity. Lawrence Goodwyn found in east Texas an unusual coalition of black and white public officials: it had begun during Reconstruction and continued into the Populist period. The state government was in the control of white Democrats, but in Grimes County, blacks won local offices and sent legislators to the state capital. The district clerk was a black man; there were black deputy sheriffs and a black school principal. A night-riding White Man's Union used intimidation and murder to split the coalition, but Goodwyn points to "the long years of interracial cooperation in Grimes County" and wonders about missed opportunities. ~ Howard Zinn

Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur's strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

We want the truth, Detective. You are confusing that with what we choose to tell the public. ~ Michael Connelly

A fundamental premise of American democratic theory is that government exists to serve the people ... Public records are one portal through which the people observe their government, ensuring its accountability, integrity, and equity while minimizing sovereign mischief and malfeasance ~ Sandra Day O'Connor

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. ~ Billy Collins

Working people of this country want economic security. The worst possible thing you can do for those families is bust the public finances, have some welfare system this country can't afford. ~ George Osborne

I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodological strictness to an extreme when he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to enunciate them and give them out, he ought to avoid the cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Public housing is more than just a place to live, public housing programs should provide opportunities to residents and their families. ~ Carolyn McCarthy

What must never be lost sight of is that a public functionary, in his capacity as functionary, produces absolutely nothing; that, on the contrary, he exists only on the products of the industrious class; and that he can consume nothing that has not been taken from the producers. ~ Charles Dunoyer

Perhaps it's not that I'm frigid
it's that once I decide I like a guy, I turn into a raging idiot, unfit for public appearances. ~ Rachel Cohn

As the master politician navigates the ship of state, he both creates and responds to public opinion. Adept at tacking with the wind, he also succeeds, at times, in generating breezes of his own. ~ Stewart Udall

Healthy, well-informed, balanced criticism is the ozone of public life. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

A people's wrath voiced abroad bringeth grave Danger, no less than public curse pronounced. ~ Aeschylus

Back in 2008, unable to come to terms with its many creditors, Vallejo had declared bankruptcy. Eighty percent of the city's budget - and the lion's share of the claims that had thrown it into bankruptcy - were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public safety workers. Relations between the police and the firefighters, on the one hand, and the citizens, on the other, were at historic lows. The public safety workers thought that the city was out to screw them on their contracts; the citizenry thought that the public safety workers were using fear as a tool to extort money from them. The local joke was that "P.D." stands for "Pay or Die." The city council meetings had become exercises in outrage: at one, a citizen arrived and tossed a severed pig's head onto the floor. ~ Michael Lewis

Ive had the best possible chance of learning that what the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs, Doctorto develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect. ~ Henrik Ibsen

Cable would not translate into the public radio universe. ~ Juan Williams

The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less informed part of the community. They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding. ~ James Madison

Moreover, the sciences are monuments devoted to the public good; each citizen owes to them a tribute proportional to his talents. While the great men, carried to the summit of the edifice, draw and put up the higher floors, the ordinary artists scattered in the lower floors, or hidden in the obscurity of the foundations, must only seek to improve what cleverer hands have created. ~ Charles-Augustin De Coulomb

Titles are public. They are for others to notice. I expect others to address me according to my titles, but I do not address myself with them
unless, of course, I address myself as an other. ~ James P. Carse

The public official must pick his way nicely, must learn to placate though not to yield too much, to have the art of honeyed words but not to seem neutral, and above all to keep constantly audible, visible, likable, even kissable. ~ Learned Hand

What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves. ~ William Hazlitt

The technologies for the alternative energy sources exists today. The economics are compelling. The public health is compelling. Why would we maintain a focus on a 17th-century technology, when there are 21st-century alternatives that are both necessary and available? And the answer is the subversion of democracy. ~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I'll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can't go back in life. I won't go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way. ~ Karl Rove

[ ... ] no one had lived up to the roles they acted out in public. They wasted their years trying to live the lies that they had created for themselves. Only in private could they really be the demons, hypocrites and sinners they really were, and woe betide anyone who caught them at their game, because the only thing worse than a lie is a lie exposed. ~ Marilyn Manson

I never felt terribly comfortable in the public eye. ~ Molly Ringwald

But it's not your fault. You can't control what other people do.

No, but I was responsible for my own actions. At some point we had abandoned responsibility and began fostering corruption in others so that we might shield ourselves from persecution by virtue of a common guilt. We did this in the name of profit, and we justified our crimes with the rationalization that, somewhere down the line, better people would safeguard our victims from us. I wasn't a looter or a moocher. I wasn't a producer either. None of us were. We certainly weren't capitalists. We were pillagers. Decency exists. That alone must make it important; even the great Darwin himself would say that. But we tried to cut decency out of others so as to lower the bar for ourselves.

We are relative creatures. The man who teaches his slaves to read is a saint in a world where slavery is legal, and a monster where it isn't. We aren't born knowing if we're good or bad. We decide by comparing ourselves to others - and by that yardstick it's no different to measure by our own successes than our neighbors failures, save that it's easier to corrupt the neighbor. ~ Nicholas Lamar Soutter

In New York, no one really cares who the hell you are. It's strange to be in the public eye where people have a perception of who you are, when they have never even met you. ~ Roland Orzabal

The cruelest form of death, I have no doubt, is not physical death. Rather it is that public death which comes from the killing of ideas about God. ~ James V. Schall

I am going to sing lesbian love songs and support gay rights no matter what. The rest is public relations. ~ Jasmine Guy

When I stepped into the brown-tiled entryway of the Kentwood Public Library, the sunlight flowing down on me from the high windows, I felt a sense of importance. It gratified me to be in a place devoted to books and quiet; I was filled with a sense of hope. Reading to me was fundamental, as fundamental as food. And nothing could be more satisfying than reading a good book while eating a good meal of mi soup, french fries, and a thin cut of steak. I plowed through books as fast as possible in order to read them again. ~ Bich Minh Nguyen

The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse. ~ Chris Hedges

If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights. ~ Tony Benn

Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases. ~ Robert H. Jackson