Public Figures Quotes

Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician. ~ Virginia Postrel

When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

With public figures involved in a relationship it seems that there is a machine behind their love so oftentimes. ~ Joaquin Phoenix

Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. ~ Stewart Brand

There needs to be a planned series of speeches, interviews, etc., over the next two or three months by administration officials and other public figures talking about President Ford, what he is trying to do and what he has accomplished. ~ Robert Teeter

People love to see public figures get taken down a notch, and by the same token, everyone loves to be the center of attention, even when there's a target on their forehead. ~ Jeff Ross

The trouble is that privacy is at once essential to, and in tension with, both freedom and security. A cabinet minister who keeps his mistress in satin sheets at the French taxpayer's expense cannot justly object when the press exposes his misuse of public funds. Our freedom to scrutinise the conduct of public figures trumps that minister's claim to privacy. The question is: where and how do we draw the line between a genuine public interest and that which is merely what interests the public? ~ Timothy Garton Ash

It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. . . . An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. . . . It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. ~ Joseph Mitchell

I said once that lies have no rights against truth. I was wrong. In daily life, it's the truth that's disenfranchised. What fits the popular narrative, what makes an observer happy with the consistency of events, is what is believed. ~ Adrian Lamo

War. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn't acting competitively - that should be encouraged - but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn't, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves. In ~ Sebastian Junger

Scientists are used to debating with one another about the finer points of new research. But increasingly, they find themselves battling their televisions and computer screens, which transmit ever-more-heated rhetoric from politicians, pundits, and other public figures who misinterpret, misrepresent, and malign scientific results. ~ Lewis M. Branscomb

The efficacy of fashion turns on the self's perception of itself either as a nought or at least as lacking something, and its perception or misperception of the splendid wholeness of public figures as evidenced by even the most carelessly worn badges of their substantiality - when in truth the selves of Jackie Onassis and Wallis Simpson and John Wayne are probably more insubstantial than most. Question: ~ Walker Percy

In late modernity we grow more and more accustomed to politicians and public figures who are indebted to their appetites for their "values," to their intellectual sloth for their "principles," to their rhetorical cleverness for their "conscience," and to their regimented conformism for their "philosophy." ~ Kenny Smith

The Steyer brothers deplore the Koch brothers' big-money contributions, as they seek to trump them. That the formers' money in part derives from coal investments matters little given their green intentions. The media are furious over rumor-mongering about Hillary Clinton's health, but that is an ad hoc concern, not one born of principle about leaving the private health issues of public figures alone, given that they not long ago gladly trafficked in sick rumors about Sarah Palin's supposed faked pregnancy. ~ Anonymous

Over the last several months, public figures from the Pope downwards have bombarded us with the injunctions to fight against the culture of excessive greed and consumption. This disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into a matter of personal sin, a private psychological propensity. The self-propelling circulation of Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, blinding us to even the most obvious dangers we are courting. ~ Slavoj Zizek

My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong. ~ Langston Hughes

It will kill four times as many Americans as AIDS will over the next decade. I feel that what ever kind of disability God has given me, as an entertainer and as a public figure, it is so I can be a representative for others. ~ Naomi Judd

I don't think it's easy for women to watch themselves age. And I think it's obviously doubly hard to grow older when you are a public figure and you constantly have to see your image all the time, and people are constantly pointing it out. ~ Michelle Pfeiffer

Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy. ~ Joshua Lederberg

I don't much like being a public figure, because so often how people appear is not how they really are, and I think one of the issues about our society is that we make judgments about people on the basis of very flimsy evidence. ~ Robert Winston

Artists are very sensitive and heart-driven, and are usually prone to speaking freely about anything that touches them. The first way to identify a corrupt society is to study public figures in the entertainment sector. If many lack real talent, or have talent but rarely speak out openly about policies that affect them besides the environment, then that country has rigid gatekeepers. ~ Suzy Kassem

Players have responsibilities, because, whether they like it or not, they are public figures. They have to be aware that the people who come to the ground spend fortunes in relation to what they earn. ~ Gerard Houllier

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

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

There is a cannibalism that's loose in our society in which public figures such as the Clintons could try to come into this town and do something good for this country and then they get hammered away even though they're trying to do the right thing. ~ David Gergen

When public figures think they can open a business even though they've got no business experience, it's a bad idea. ~ Moby

There are a lot of public figures who, before they take a stand on a issue, they talk about it with their publicist and they figure out how it's going to affect record sales. Life is really too short to worry about that sort of thing. ~ Moby

Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive. ~ Pete Hamill

I know, in India, specially in Bollywood and the sports fraternity, there is a lot of negative media attention on prominent public figures. ~ Leander Paes

If public figures came out of the closet, then the LGBT kids who saw them on TV would feel safe before they even knew why they felt dangerous. Maybe if enough people came out of the closet, gay kids would never feel dangerous. Maybe we could have a world where we could all just live. We may not all agree, but why can't we just all live? ~ Margaret Cho

One of the criteria by which we measure the worth of public figures is whether or not their brand of bull is in step with the current Zeitgeist. ~ John MacLachlan Gray

I've dated some very enthusiastic, attractive people and some very unenthusiastic, less attractive people. I see no correlation. But female friends of mine who have dated male public figures have found that is the case. They say male models are terrible in bed, because they feel like just showing up is all the effort they need to make. ~ Moby

It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures. ~ Marquis De Sade

I was receiving at least ninety-nine incredible, positive, and life-changing responses for every negative or abusive one, yet I couldn't stop looking at the one percent. I couldn't get them out of my mind. I let them kill my excitement. I let them destroy my love for what I was doing. I let them shut me down. I let them bully me into changing the way I did things around here.
I almost stopped. I almost gave up. I almost quit writing.
But every time, I remembered my dad.
He taught me better than that.
And I forced myself to be excited again. I forced myself to see the goal and vision of why I was excited in the first place. I forced myself to start skipping over the negative replies and start diving into the loving ones. ~ Dan Pearce

I just have to remind myself that my daily quotidie in life has almost nothing to do with any aspect of my professional life as a public figure. ~ Moby

I'm much more conscious of historical events since the '60s. In the '60s, I was insulated by my own addictions, my own lifestyle, from what was going on in the world. After I recovered I was amazed at certain people who had died. I hadn't noticed that they had gone. Not friends ... I'm talking about public figures who had passed away. ~ Tennessee Williams

Brands, musicians, and public figures were among the first to embrace video on 'Instagram', and we've been impressed with how brands have extended their reach with video ads. ~ Kevin Systrom

I owe 90 per cent of my life to people because I am a public figure, but 10 per cent is private to me. And I am not saying it in a defensive way. I feel my life has been made into a TV serial. ~ Priyanka Chopra

The limited fictions used to sell the lives of public figures often form a cloudy chiaroscuro that covers their true humanity. ~ William J. Mann

It's my job to play this role that I'm cast in to the very best of my ability, the same as any other actor. You can't possibly be yourself in the public eye. All the little things that make us human don't stand up under the scrutiny of the camera. [on being a public figure] ~ Adrian Lamo

You can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on. ~ Sydney Schanberg

I'm looking forward to being able to retire from being a public figure and being able to afford to be myself! ~ James Taylor

This not a criticism of [Mitt] Romney; please don't anybody call him up and say I'm ripping him. I'm not. I'm simply telling you that the connection [Donald] Trump has with his supporters, slash, audience, is unique. Not everybody politician has it, and certainly not every public figure has such a connection with their audience. ~ Rush Limbaugh

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen. ~ Cecil Day-Lewis

I always knew that I would be some type of public figure, but I never knew that it would be rapping. ~ Freddie Gibbs

Once you're a public figure, there's a certain amount of privacy you do give up. ~ Jay Roach

I don't really have a comprehension of being a public figure. ~ John Malkovich

There are some public figures who are very private and almost hide behind their work. I try to be as open as possible. ~ Moby

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. ~ Gore Vidal

I'm not psychic. I cannot know what is in the mind of particular public figures. ~ John Bercow

Our public figures are often narcissists, utterly self-absorbed in their quest for power. ~ Nicholas Kristof

We love to obsess about the problems, drama and scandals in the lives of public figures because it gives us a perfect vehicle to pass judgment without consequences and avoid dealing with our own issues. ~ Gamal Hennessy

I think that the most important reason to come out is your own sanity; that's above everything else. I think that applies whether you're a public figure or not. The closet is a terrible place to be for the person who's in it. ~ Christopher Rice

One of my greatest sources of pride as president of the New York Public Library is the continuance of the library's open, free, and democratic posture, the fact that we are here for Everyman, that we are indeed Everyman's university, the place where the scholar who is not college-affiliated can come and work and feel at home. ~ Vartan Gregorian

One of the towering people in this industry said, why don't you go and make a five-year contract with somebody, make yourself several million dollars and put it away, then go and do whatever you want, work for public TV if you want. ~ Roone Arledge

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing. ~ Mick Cornett

Babson became a sought-after public speaker, and the newspapers reported his predictions as newsworthy events. ~ Walter Friedman

We're all here to figure out how to best give ourselves away. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Schiller has said, the only relation with the public of which a man never repents - is war. ~ Anonymous

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission - his life. ...

Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded - Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer - everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book - it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...

The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...

The library, almost alone of the g ~ Archibald MacLeish

It didn't take elaborate experiments to deduce that an infant would die from want of food. But it took centuries to figure out that infants can and do perish from want of love. ~ Louise J. Kaplan

All her life, Parwana had made sure to avoid standing in front of a mirror with her sister [...] But in public, every stranger's eye was a mirror. There was no escape ~ Khaled Hosseini

Once and for all, people must understand that addiction is a disease. It's critical if we're going to effectively prevent and treat addiction. Accepting that addiction is an illness will transform our approach to public policy, research, insurance, and criminality; it will change how we feel about addicts, and how they feel about themselves. There's another essential reason why we must understand that addiction is an illness and not just bad behavior: We punish bad behavior. We treat illness. ~ David Sheff

Certainly some researchers are thinking more realistically about the market's prospects and reaching better-informed positions on its future, but these are not the names that grab the headlines and thus influence public attitudes. ~ Robert J. Shiller

It's a token for the arcade games at Laser Sport Time!" Dan hissed. "Uncle Alistair doesn't think so," Amy murmured. "He's a numismatist." "He takes his clothes off in public?" Dan said. ~ Peter Lerangis

Disciples of Jesus Christ have had a profound life-altering experience. They have encountered a supernatural personality, revealed in history as Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Messiah. And they have discovered the meaning and purpose of their lives in the subsequent revelation of his continuing presence to them. The experience demands a faithful, reliable witness.

What would public opinion say of a person who discovered the absolute cure for AIDS, but was unwilling to share that cure with a world that so desperately needs it? What if the antidote were kept hidden and made use of by only the discoverer and his family? We would consider it an moral outrage and he or she would be infamous. Why? We expect the cure to be shared, not only shared, but made available to all as soon as possible! ~ David C. Alves

And here before me stands a marvelously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I knew to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. we are public icons, we two: he an icon of kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet very necessary; we have obligations above what is merely personal, and to let personal feelings obscure the obligations would be failing in one's duty.

This was clearer still afterward, at lunch at the Savoy....; they all seemed to accept me as a genuine hero, and I did my best to behave decently, neither believing in it too obviously, nor yet protesting that I was just a simple chap who had done his duty when he saw it--a pose that has always disgusted me. Ever since, I have tried to think charitably of people in prominent positions of one kind or another. We cast them in roles, and it is only right to consider them as players, without trying to discredit them with knowledge of their off-stage life--unless they drag it into the middle of the stage themselves. ~ Robertson Davies

Public morals are natural complement of all laws they are by themselves an entire code. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies. ~ Tony Judt

A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

The procedure has a strange Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The reservoir was created as a public water supply, yet the community, probably unconsulted about the sportsmen's project, is forced either to drink water containing poisonous residues or to pay our tax money for treatment of the water to remove the poisons - treatments that are by no means foolproof. ~ Rachel Carson

Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years. ~ Samuel Beckett

No citizen is apolitical; as a citizen, by definition, has to take interest in public affairs. ~ Mohammad Hamid Ansari

The cause of all this was the pursuit of power driven by greed and ambition, leading in turn to the passions of the party rivalries thus established. The dominant men on each side in the various cities employed fine-sounding terms, claiming espousal either of democratic rights for all or of a conservative aristocracy, but the public whose interests they professed to serve were in fact their ultimate prize ~ Thucydides

Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments. ~ Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

Here is the treasure chest of the world - the public library, or a bookstore. ~ Ben Carson

The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they'd printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of aeroplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it's easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger. ~ Neal Stephenson

The issue for the major companies is how, is how when and where to make their content online. So you look at these major cable companies, whether it's Disney or Time Warner, News Corp., ESPN, USA, they're being very very careful, about making their content available over the internet, and they're trying to figure it out. ~ Harry E. Sloan

My job [as a teacher] is to love the Scriptures in public. And then sit down. ~ Lauren F. Winner

Sistani's office refuses the replacement of the law [which excludes former Baath Party members from returning to public life] because it is not an Iraqi demand but it is a political demand to please some sides. ~ Ali Al-Sistani

One of the telltale signs of one who has completely embraced their authentic self is that they are, with great consistency, the same person in public as they are behind closed doors. Until you learn how to access your authentic voice, the uniqueness of who you truly are will never be fully realized. What makes you special (just like everyone else) is that you were placed here on this planet to express the one-of-a-kind being only you can be. ~ Dennis Merritt Jones

Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. ~ Rebecca Skloot

Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws. ~ Barton Gellman

For in America this season is decreed "family season". (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don't have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year's season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year's season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it.
How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie's robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie's frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: "Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you've just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you ~ Joyce Carol Oates

My early years abroad were spent mainly upon the European Continent, and public duties since have led me to make prolonged stays in various Continental states France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia where the study of Continental statesmen has been almost forced upon me. ~ Andrew Dickson White

It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them. ~ Jonathan Swift

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. ~ Bruce Sterling

From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves. ~ David P. Ellerman

Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for young people, the elderly, people of color, and the impoverished.36 At this historical juncture there is a merging of violence and governance along with the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. This becomes obvious in the emergence of a surveillance state in which social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as both necessary and benign. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly regards each and every person as a potential terrorist suspect. ~ Henry A. Giroux

As a director, I really wanted to learn and I needed to get away from my own stuff to figure out how to just do things and work with good people. ~ Paul Feig

Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table [the Constitution] gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor ... ~ George Mason

The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed. ~ Anita Loos

Miriam Were has made outstanding contributions to public health in the developing world. She brings basic medical services to women and children in East Africa. ~ Liya Kebede

AT&T will not block access to the public Internet or degrade service, period. ~ Edward Whitacre, Jr.