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P Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All P Quotes

“Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.”

“Public housing must not always represent the barest minimum of design consideration. Ask where the architect, contractor, administrator and legislator live? It will not be in public housing. Ask them if they would want to live in the complex they just created? The truthful answer will be “no way”. Until what is built is desirable and available to everyone, the future of of public housing will remain a marginal investment at best and an environmental crime at worst.”

“Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.”

“Public intervention into private businesses during crises blurs and changes the traditional boundaries between the private spheres of business and the public sphere of government. These public actions during crisis alter norms and social expectations about government intervention in business.”

“Public lands seizure, conceived as a fell swoop of the sword, will likely never come to pass. The law bars it, precedent bars it, and the Supreme Court has spoken to this effect repeatedly. FLPMA, unless amended by Congress, establishes that the land shall remain in the hands of all citizens in perpetuity. I think the seizure will require more delicate schemes, slowly moving and imperceptibly violent. In Congress it starts with an amendment to an appropriations bill here and there. A rider or two or three to bills that otherwise must pass to maintain the budget. It’s easy to curtail the protection of seeming irrelevancies like grass, soil, water, air, and wildlife when the public is distracted with the question of whether the government will go on functioning.”

“Public libraries have succumbed to the same pressures that have overwhelmed the basic cultural functions of museums and universities, aims that should remain what they were, not because the old ways are always better but because in this case they were the right ones: the sustaining of standards, the preservation of quality, the conservation of literacy's history, the education of the heart, eye and mind. Now libraries devote far too much of their restricted space, and their limited budget, to public amusement. It is a fact of philistine life that amusement is where the money is.”

“Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists.'”

“Public lives are lived out on the job and in the marketplace, where certain rules, conventions, laws, and social customs keep most of us in line. Private lives are lived out in the presence of family, friends, and neighbors who must be considered and respected even though the rules and proscriptions are looser than what's allowed in public. But in our secret lives, inside our own heads, almost anything goes.”