Thousands of members of Congress have come and gone over the years, their individual achievements hidden in committee reports, private compromises, amendments pushed through or blocked, and innumerable, unnoticed meetings.
In 2004, President Bush gave Prime Minister Sharon certain guarantees about American policy, but the Obama administration treated those as a kind of private letter having no binding policy impact.
Why do we tend to consider ourselves happier than homeless street dwellers? If there is no money, no gold, no private property, no marriage, no religion, no government, there is absolutely nothing to trouble about.
I think I'm not always what I seem. Most people, when they get to know me, say, 'You know, when I first met you...' People initially think I'm a snob because I'm intensely private.
The only thing we don't do together is get in front of an actor and show any indecision at all about what we think. We don't always agree, so we meet privately, then one or the other will approach the actor.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.
I just feel my sexuality is private. I'm very shy about being sexy. That part of me has been so closed to the public eye. I've sold millions of records with my clothes on.
The Fourth Amendment is quite clear on the notion that search and seizure must not be unreasonable. It is difficult to think of something more unreasonable than searching the private phone records and digital information of citizens who are suspected...
Private-sector firms are increasingly active in the prison industry and they and the militantly unionized correctional officers, almost all unskilled labor, constantly lead public demands for more criminal statutes and more draconian penalties.
I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.
I get the hypocrisy thing, but any human being is allowed to have a public and private face, and celebrities should have the same rights as regular people to decide what cards they lay down and what cards they hide.
If you let people own their land, they take care of it. That's why privately owned land is always taken care of, and the parks look like cesspools. Nobody takes care of what everybody owns.
I have a private press. I'm a book artist. I publish books of other authors and artists. I do the illustrating. I set the type. I print it myself on my press. I do everything but bind it.
One of the things that probably drew me to writing was that it was something you could get on with by yourself. Publishing means going public. But the actual activity could scarcely be more invisible. And private.
I wish I could write more make-believe. It's a lot easier to write about hard times and when things are going wrong. But I've never been a private person.
I'm angry that the private sector, which is supposed to be in charge of running gasoline into the Valley, doesn't have its act together to deal with a critical situation, so now the public sector has to step in.
I have been fiercely private, in part because I could never understand how a journalist could be otherwise. I was also the mother of small children, and security concerns were paramount.
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Critics might contend that putting former private-sector CEOs in the president's Cabinet places the fox in the henhouse. But it's unlikely such executives would expose themselves to the headaches if they weren't genuinely motivated by the call to ser...
Sometimes I would write something that was so private, people would say, 'Make it more universal.' I never liked that idea. I always thought the more personal a song was, the more people would want to hear it.
Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.
