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To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

Oscar Wilde
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The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde
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The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. -Oscar Wilde
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The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Oscar Wilde
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You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.

Benjamin Disraeli
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When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. -Thomas Jefferson
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I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.

Thomas Jefferson
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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.

Thomas Jefferson
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You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public. -Scott Adams
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Morals are private. Decency is public.

Rita Mae Brown
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Show me the man who keeps his house in hand,He's fit for public authority.

Sophocles
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The first mistake in public business is the going into it. -Benjamin Franklin
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There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.

Calvin Coolidge
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My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefor excused from saving Universes.

Douglas Adams
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We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. -Aesop
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All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler
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As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly. -G. K. Chesterton
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You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.

Lois McMaster Bujold
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If I can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?

Anita Roddick
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Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. -Cyril Connolly
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Public opinion is a second conscience.

William R. Alger
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There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams
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All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway. -Harry S Truman
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

Gore Vidal
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It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

Salvador Dali
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Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies. -Edgar Watson Howe
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I have no use for bodyguards, but I have very specific use for two highly trained certified public accountants.

Elvis Presley
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Every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, but private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and by means of it, make him cooperate to public good, notwithstanding his unsatiable avarice and ambition.

Alexander Hamilton
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What is inherently wrong with the word 'politician' if the fellow has devoted his life to holding public office and trying to do something for his people? -Richard J. Daley
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