A man in public life expects to be sneered at — it is the fault of his elevated situation, and not of himself.
A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.
Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.
For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.
I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.
I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.
I never know when I press these whether I am going to blow up Massachusetts or start the project.
I'm not a very gregarious person. I can't bear attention being called to me in a public place, which is ridiculous in a business that pays you to be noticed.
If you have got the public in the palm of your hand, you can be sure that is where they want to be.
It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.
The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.
The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.
The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.
The Public is a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
The public is wiser than the wisest critic.
The public seldom forgive twice.
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.