Top 1200 Public Interest Quotes & Sayings

Allowing the big dogs to create a toll lane for public education, public interest and government programming, and to make it more costly to sell products online, will be bad for Black women and our communities.

It is important that politicians defend their ability to act without fear or favour, and it is in the public interest that they hold ministers and public servants to account.

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honour, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superiour to all private passions.

I think a public official ought to follow his conscience as to what is in the public interest, not what will protect his job.

If you just believe in our democracy, and you want an informed electorate, public schools are in your interest, and I think our country is dependent on public schools, whether or not you personally have a kid in the public school system.

What do we mean by the public interest? Some say the public interest is merely what interests the public. I disagree.

The public subsidies provided to miners, loggers, and ranchers are as extravagant and as harmful to the public interest as the subsidies that the Federal Reserve and Treasury provide to the 'banks too big to fail.'

Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

Facebook draws from the public and public-interest sphere, a simultaneously bold and modest step towards acknowledging that our new networked technologies deeply affect our lives in ways not always captured or best shaped by the typical template of consumer and seller.

The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.

The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.

An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.

There's no doubt that in the last two to three decades, American democracy has been hacked. It was based on the regular harvesting of the wisdom of crowds, but now big sources of special interest money are able to prevent the passage of almost any meaningful reform that's aimed at the public interest.

My heart breaks living in southern Utah on the edge of America's Redrock Wilderness, witnessing what the Bush Administration's policies regarding oil and gas exploitation are doing to our public lands that belong to all Americans. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests. The Secretary of the Interior is urging the Bureau of Land Management to support the gas and oil industry's most extreme drilling scenario in some of the American West's most pristine and fragile areas without proper legal and public input.

The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy.

When governments go too far to punish people for actions that are dissent rather than a real threat to the nation, they risk delegitimizing not just their systems of justice, but the legitimacy of the government itself. Because when they bring political charges against people for acts that were clearly at least intended to work in the public interest, they deny them the opportunity to mount a public-interest defense.

Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.

The object of every free government is the public good, and all lesser interests yield to it. That of every tyrannical government, is the happiness and aggrandizement of one, or a few, and to this the public felicity, and every other interest must submit.

Companies like Enron have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programs or hiring moonlighting professors can return big payoffs in generating books, reports, articles, testimony and other materials to push for and rationalize public policy positions that damage the public interest but benefit corporate bottomlines.

I developed an interest in supporting independent journalists in a way that leverages their work to the greatest extent possible, all in support of the public interest.

The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality.

In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.

The Open Market Committee, as presently established, is plainly not in the public interest. This committee must be operated by purely public servants, representatives of the people as a whole and not any single interest group. The Open Market Committee should be abolished, and its powers transferred to the Federal Reserve Board - the present public members of the committee, with reasonably short terms of office.

When we control business in the public interest we are also bound to encourage it in the public interest or it will be a bad thing for everybody and worst of all for those on whose behalf the control is nominally exercised.

They may then be willing to cast principled votes based on an educated understanding of the public interest in the face of polls suggesting that the public itself may have quite a different understanding of where its interest lies.

Public interest criteria does not mean criteria that the public decides are in its interest. It means that the elite - via various appointed bodies - decide what the public's interest is for them.

A free society depends upon a high degree of mutual trust. The public will not give that trust to officials who are not seen to be impartially dedicated to the general public interest, nor will they give trust to those high in government who violate the rule of law they ask citizens to obey at the expense of self-interest, or to those who present government as the place where one feathers his own nest, [or] exchanges favors with friends and former associates.

To serve the public interest is not the same as being a servant of public opinion.

The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.

Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."

Municipal laws are a supply to the wisdom of each individual; and, at the same time, by restraining the natural liberty of men, make private interest submit to the interest of the public.

To say that only those businesses affected with a public interest may be regulated is but another way of stating that all those businesses which may be regulated are affected with a public interest.

In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.

I'm not deluded enough to think that everyone who knows my name is a listener. You know, I hope that part of that interest - part of that public interest - has to do with me still making records that people like.

The human interest, and the natural interest, and the spiritual interest of this planet need to begin to take a priority over the corporate interest, the military interest, and the materialistic interests.

Whatever concerns health is of real public interest.

What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'.

By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.

The financial history of the last century shows a steady increase in the amount of public indebtedness. Nobody believes that the states will eternally drag the burden of these interest payments. It is obvious that sooner or later all these debts will be liquidated in some way or other, but certainly not by payment of interest and principal according to the terms of the contract.

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?

...there is no more effective public interest watchdog in Washington, D.C.

Much of the criticism centered around Betsy DeVos focuses on her lack of experience with public schools. While she has shown some interest in 'protecting' students from the non-existent threat of grizzlies wandering onto their campuses, she has never run, taught in, attended, or sent a child to a public school.

TDP is always very assertive for public interest.

The papers feed the public interest but then the public interest demands more in the press and speculation can look like fact.

Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience: (1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups; (2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies; (3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest. This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.

... between government, business, and the public, there is a triangular community of interest. Clearly, it is in business' interest to shape its behavior to prevailing public values; it is more efficient to do so than not to do so. It is also clear that government is the high-cost alternative through which public values are imposed on corporations that do not accurately perceive these values.

Harshness towards individuals who flout the laws and commands of the state is for the public good; no greater crime against the public interest is possible than to show leniency to those who violate it.

. . when the target of crime is armed, there is more law present, more public policy present, and more public interest served than by all 20,000 gun laws in force.

I lost interest in being in the public eye.

To attach full confidence to an institution of this nature, it appears to be an essential ingredient in its structure, that it shall be under private and not a public direction-under the guidance of individual interest, not of public policy; which, would be . . . liable to being too much influenced by public necessity.

Public interest is a very unruly horse.

There is no self-interest completely unrelated to others' interests. Due to the fundamental interconnectedness which lies at the heart of reality, your interest is also my interest. From this it becomes clear that "my" interest and "your" interest are intimately connected. In a deep sense, they converge.

Public servants should be focused on serving the public - not any special interest group, and good governance should be an expectation - not an exception.

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

There is already huge public interest in stage musicals.

If you are given a public responsibility, you have to listen, weigh up all the issues, but ultimately you have to form a view of what you genuinely think is in the public interest... put the public interest above the vested interest.

I'm really interested in how we view the public figure, what makes a public figure, what makes a celebrity, and how images make politicians, so I take an interest in politics, but it's really an interest in the image.

Philosophers feel a little more cautious about letting down their technical guard lest the general public doesn't recognize their special credentials. It's the fact that philosophy is of general interest that, paradoxically, keeps philosophers from wanting to speak in a way that's accessible to the general public.

A newspaper is a private enterprise owing nothing whatsoever to the public, which grants it no franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest.

I do not like to "interest" the public with myself.