Top 1200 Public Office Quotes & Sayings

Conscious of our many problems, I seek today to lay a foundation to our public policy. My fundamental purpose is to devote my term of office to raising the standard of public service in New Jersey.

Fish have got to swim. Birds have got to fly, and Clintons have to run for office. It's what they do. It's a metabolic urge. That's all they've done their entire life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office.

You have to decide what those issues are for you. What do you think disqualifies a person from holding public office? I believe that the endorsement of the right to kill unborn children disqualifies a person from any position of public office. It's simply the same as saying that the endorsement of racism, fraud, or bribery, would disqualify him - except that child-killing is more serious than those.

Well, I think that those of us in public life that are trying to do a good job, and that are faced with this popular new game that the media has of being critical of everything that anybody in public office does probably are thin-skinned.

In creating superdelegates, the Democratic Party recognized the expertise that its top holders of public office have gained by running for office themselves. They are experts at winning. They know the issues. They are in a unique position to evaluate presidential candidates.

Corruption is when people in public office use that public office for private or selfish ends. This is one of the most central debates in the last 40 years in law, what is corruption.

When I first ran for public office, it was with the passion and idealism of a young man who believed that government could help make our lives better, that public service was a calling and that citizenship demanded responsibilities. There was a greater good.

The phrase public office is a public trust, has of last become common property.

The office of the public teacher is an unenviable and thankless one.

If you don't like public service, don't run for office.

The PUP came into office in 1998 when the public debt of Belize was over $600 million and the economy was at a standstill. When we left office in 2008, ten years later, the debt was higher, but a lot was accomplished: the economy was transformed and the social and physical infrastructure of the country significantly upgraded.

Nowadays, for the sake of the advantage which is to be gained from the public revenues and from office, men want to be always in office.

I have no desire to run for public office.

I didn't intend to run for public office. I didn't really think about it.

There is no constitutional or legal requirement that the President shall take the oath of office in the presence of the People but there is so manifest an appropriateness in the public induction to office of the chief executive officer of the nation that from the beginning of the Government the people to whose service the official oath consecrates the officer, have been called to witness the solemn ceremonial

What is my calling? What am I supposed to do? I think running for office, public office, can be a divine calling. I mean, Ive wrestled with that very question myself.

I'm intrigued by being in public office.

Public office is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

A public office is not a job, it is an opportunity to do something for the public.

For almost 50 years polls have shown that a large majority of the public believe that the budget should be balanced, and for all that time they have elected office seekers who would not balance it. The public cares about deficits, but doesn't care much.

No one you'd really like to see in public office has the bad taste to run.

Most of the people who are in elective office in Washington, D.C., they have held public office before. How's that workin' for you?

... the People of God have to elect public servants who know the difference between serving the public and killing the public, and that those who can't tell the difference don't belong in public office.

Anyone who campaigns for public office becomes disqualified for holding any office at all.

Those of us in public office and those of us who aspire to public office have a responsibility to be reasonable, fact-based, in our rhetoric and to not suggest things that are unreasonable, to whip up a lot of emotion in public, which can lead to government overreach, fear, suspicions, and prejudice.

We are the raison d'être of the entire system. We are also the employers of those in public office and in the public service. Why should we accept from them a discourse which suggests contempt for us and for the democratic system?

When I left office in 1979, I was about the only one who had really left public office on my own.

What is my calling? What am I supposed to do? I think running for office, public office, can be a divine calling. I mean, I've wrestled with that very question myself.

For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.

I don't claim any moral or ethical high ground, but I also have chosen not to run for public office. Shouldn't there be a higher standard of conduct for public officials?

There are very few people who have had as much public impact as I've already had... without being elected to public office in Massachusetts.

The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day.

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.

During my two terms serving the good people of New Hampshire's First District, I always worked for what I call the bottom 99% of Americans, and I never forgot that public office is a public trust.

The new political gospel: public office is private graft.

One of the things that you learn, having been in this [President's] office for four years, is the old adage of Abraham Lincoln's. That with public opinion there's nothing you can't do and without public opinion there's very little you can get done.

See, one of the interesting things in the Oval Office - I love to bring people into the Oval Office - right around the corner from here - and say, this is where I office, but I want you to know the office is always bigger than the person.

Our public officials have forgotten that they are ultimately accountable to the people who put them in office, that the information they keep in secrecy belongs to all of us. Julian Assange took a courageous step by rightfully returning what belongs to the public domain. For that reason, I believe we need to stand behind him.

I'm not one of the people who have to be in public office.

We shouldn't leave the work of politics to people who run for public office.

I always felt, and I still feel, that the media doesn't belong in a public official's private life. It's a very difficult balance, because if you are elected to public office, people have a right to know a great deal about you, and the press has an absolute obligation to report all of that. But the reality is that there are times in which the reporting is really happening for almost voyeuristic reasons, in the gossip columns. Maybe half of it is wrong, and half of it is correct, and a lot of it is exaggerated. You've just got to get used to that if you're in public life.

Public office must not be a means to profit or become rich.

Public office is a public trust, the authority and opportunities of which must be used as absolutely as the public moneys for the public benefit, and not for the purposes of any individual or party.

Anybody who runs for public office today has got to know his life or her life will be an open book. I've decided that if you want to run for public office you have to decide at the age of 5 and live accordingly.

Hillary Clinton has spent those decades before her time in public office and since her time in public office advocating for common sense measures to fight gun violence.

If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

I ran for public office to do something good.

Something's happened in our society which I don't think is beneficial, and that's that you see the public being fed box-office news. Newscasts now, every local station - I've been traveling around the country a lot, and you see the local news, and they give box-office reports.

Happy family: The existence and maintenance of [this] is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory, the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the penises and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances.

It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.

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 my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

Public office is a public trust.

When I started out in public life there used to be a saying we'd hear from time to time, that every man who runs for public office will claim that he was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands. Well, my mother knew better. And she made sure I did too.

Rudolph Giuliani will be the first Secretary of State whose last public office was mayor, the most thoroughly domestic public office that we have.

Public office is supposed to be a public trust. This is a clear sign of the rampant corruption at the highest levels of the Republican leadership.

Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

The public character of every public servant is legitimate subject of discussion, and his fitness or unfitness for office may be fairly canvassed by any person.

Being brave is what led to three rejections from Yale Law School before being accepted. It led to losing my 2010 race for U.S. Congress, and another failed bid for public office in 2013, this time for public advocate of New York City.