There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
One cannot fail to notice the inconsistency of those rejecting human rights: their rejection takes place in the public square created by human rights. It is difficult to reject human rights without using them.
He executed his commission with great promptitude and dispatch, only calling at one public-house for half a minute, and even that might be said to be in his way, for he went in at one door and came out at the other[.]
It is a false and dangerous situation which bases public power on private want, and roots the grandeur of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a badly constituted grandeur which combines all the material elements, and into which no mor...
Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children....
The problem with our society is that our values aren’t in the right place. There’s an awful lot of bleeding and naked bodies on prime-time networks, but not nearly enough cable television on public programming.
It is true, law and war are much alike. War is but a more public kind of lawing; and law is but a more private kind of waring; and both of them remedies of the last refuge.
I don't think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.
The public loves to create a hero....Sometimes I think they do it for the sheer joy of knocking him down from the highest peak. Like a child who builds a house of blocks and then destroys it with one vicious kick.
Progress is dependent upon a productive and dynamic tension between institutionalism and insurrectionism. Insurrectionists keep our institutions honest. Insurrection us are stewards of our collective public life.
All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.
I love public speakers who give moving speeches—particularly if they bring boxes, packing tape, and dollies. The last local politician I heard speak was so moving that I took up residence in a new county.
...three particular T-shirts with vulgar slang written on them that made the vein in his forehead poke out. It was a cute little vein and I grew fond of seeing it's public appearance while I walked behind him like a parade of humiliation.
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
This communal parenting brought me out of the privacy of our foreign enclave and into the public life of the community. Here, parenting was everyone’s responsibility; all adults were "aunties" and "uncles".
The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.
The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal.
... It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness.
I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best ...
