A Quote by Niall Ferguson
The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.
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Why should anyone be interested in my life? It's the prurience I find so extraordinary. Why, why, oh why should my private life be of any interest to the public? The only people who should be interested are my friends.
The public's appetite for what sensible newspapers call 'personality journalism' and what I call gossip is insatiable. It will never, ever stop growing because everybody dreams.
One of the things about the modern world is that the public and the private - which is not the same as the public and the personal - but the public and the private... it's very, very much harder than it used to be to have things that are private and things that are public.
The founders of this nation understood that private morality is the fount from whence sound public policy springs. Replying to Washington's first inaugural address, the Senate stated: "We feel, sir, the force and acknowledge the justness of the observation that the foundation of our national policy should be lain in private morality. If individuals be not influenced by moral principles it is in vain to look for public virtue."
I love what I do. I have an insatiable appetite for creating things and wanting to get better at what I do and always growing and never stopping. I don't know. It's something I was born with. It's definitely a drive. It's a passion, and it's driven for a love for what I do.
In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
Now we live in a time where the public and the private are completely fused and there isn't such a great distinction. We know our private lives are constantly made public. With Facebook and Twitter there isn't such a desire, it feels, to keep things private.
Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye.
Private opinion creates public opinion. Public opinion overflows eventually into national behavior as things are arranged at present, can make or mar the world. That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.
Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats.
I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.
In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
I am for a clear distinction between public and private life. I believe private matters should be regulated in private and I have asked those close to me to respect this.
The British press has been unfair to me and the public has followed.
The American taxing structure, the purpose of which was to serve the people, began instead to serve the insatiable appetite of government. If you will forgive me, you know someone has once likened government to a baby. It is an alimentary canal with an appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us. Its appetite grows keener by indulgence and all we can gratify it with at present serves but the more to inflame its insatiable desires.
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