Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public.
We have too many politicians who are poll-driven to excess. Polls are important. You've got to know what the public is thinking, but you can't let them drive you completely.
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
So, I think it has to do with the product and what you take to the public. If they like it, they're going to come see you, and if they don't, and if you're kind of getting out of the trendy line of things, then they won't come see you.
Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected i...
And I have been campaigning for the past three months trying to get the Senate Judiciary Committee that has the oversight authority and responsibility to start its own public hearings.
But I quite like that the public has a very short attention span. If I haven't been on telly for a little bit, I can sense it. People don't take as much notice of you, it's really quite palpable.
I can't micromanage what anybody pays or doesn't pay. But the concept that half of the public isn't involved with the income-tax system is somewhat odd and I'm not saying how much people should do, but we should all be part of the system.
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.
At various points, I've had a massive chip on me shoulder. I had fights about me accent with loads of those fellers you get from third-class public schools. They used to think I was speaking German.
The danger of what's happening right now in terms of using reconciliation is, the purpose of the Senate is going to be defeated. And that is to bring consensus to big issues in this country so that we have a reasoned and thoughtful approach and that ...
It almost hurts me to walk down a road and have people grab my hand and ask for my autograph and not sit and talk. When I'm finished I'm not going to be on the front page, but I'm going to be just as happy without the publicity.
Allowing a private rather than a public entity to take over your toll road merely means that your tolls will have to be that much higher to cover their more expensive debt.
If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.
Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
If someone is going to permit me to make a publication that is politically and culturally progressive and not tell me to put their favorite movie stars on the cover, if I get to do what I want in an honest way - as I did in the beginning at 'Colors' ...
It feels like an easy sum to gauge the balance between forests and, say, the proliferating free newspapers that litter our public transport. This noxious combination of words and paper represents a clear-cut crime against the biosphere.
Sometimes that mantle is hard to adjust to wearing but we are at a stage that we are comfortable with it and we recognize how we are perceived and how the real core individual that each one of us has apart from the facade that the public believes tha...
The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me.
I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.
We're trying to publicize this one and make people realize that the gun industry can clean up its act and can operate in a way that can reduce the likelihood of guns killing police officers and other innocent people.
