We’ve got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We’re not gonna get the best people in public life if we don’t do that.
It would be unthinkable in Canadian public life today for the public inauguration of our supreme political figures to be accompanied by prayer.
The line between private and public lives is a fertile one for me. I’ve lived quite a public life, and it’s the reason I have used well-known people in my work. I’m interested in what’s going on beneath the facades they present to the world, taking them to a place which is uncomfortable.
I feel a little uncomfortable at being asked the sorts of questions that other Catholics in public life tend not to be asked.
Several things about Reagan are unusual in a public man. He was not a typical politician at all, but a private man in public life.
Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.
When I make a contribution in debates and in our public life, the House wants to hear what I say. It goes quiet – it wants to know what my opinion is.
I’m a politician who has to for a time serve in public life, and I get death threats. And it is what it is because you’ve put yourself out there in the public square.
It is a fairly serious thing that you’re doing if you’re writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don’t want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.
It has been the greatest privilege of my adult and public life to have served, for 32 years, as the Member of Parliament for our local Highlands and Islands communities.
Public life has many more privileges than hardships.
There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.
Well, I think that those of us in public life that are trying to do a good job, and that are faced with this popular new game that the media has of being critical of everything that anybody in public office does probably are thin-skinned.
It is no secret that I believe my son, Attorney General Beau Biden would make a great United States Senator – just as I believe he has been a great Attorney General. But Beau has made it clear from the moment he entered public life, that any office he sought, he would earn on his own.
But, of course, she didn’t mean that she was going to retire from public life and only when the Queen removed her HRH some years later did she actually drop a hundred charities and just kept five.
Debating clubs among boys are very useful, not only as affording pleasant meetings and interesting discussions, but also as serving for training grounds for developing the knowledge and the qualities that are needed in public life.
Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life have been the consequence of action without thought.
If we are to celebrate the giants in Australian public life, then Robert Garran must be among them. A lawyer and passionate advocate of Federation, Garran was one of several hands that drafted our constitution.
There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.
I’m not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.
The Christian church in the U.S. is still strong numerically, but it has lost its decisive influence both in American public life and in American culture as a whole, especially in the major elite institutions of society.
I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn’t work out that way.
It is this desire to see civil society remain a strong and united force within the U.K. that has encouraged me to chair Citizens U.K. Commission on Islam, Participation and Public Life.
American violence is public life, it’s a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.
To have a public life, you still have the right to a private life.
These manly sentiments, in private life, make good citizens; in public life, the patriot and the hero.
I’m not a celebrity. I’m intentionally and defiantly not a celebrity. I don’t have any interest in it. I don’t have any talent for it. I keep my personal life out of my public life as cleanly as I can.
Everybody has a public life, and they have their own private life. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody has their own private, you know, agonies as well as joys. And that’s what great drama, whether it’s the movies or the theater, that’s what it shows.
Madonna is her own Hollywood studio – a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops.
Look, when you’re in the public life you have to understand, the press – good bad or indifferent – is going to chase you on occasion. When they do, you give them an opportunity to do their job and then you generally get the respect that they’ll move out of your way but not always.
I really see the vocation of politics like I see every vocation – whether it’s being a reporter or serving in public life or being a plumber – as an extension of ministry.
You know, I have found out in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me.
I’ve lost count of the number of websites that try to ‘out’ every Muslim in public life as an extremist or Islamist of some shape or form.
One of the hardiest myths in British public life is that there is a conspiracy of silence on immigration. Liberals and leftists, it is alleged, have bandied together to prevent debate or discussion of ‘mass immigration’ into the U.K., caused by Labour’s ‘open door’ policies.
Whether you’re a libertarian liberal or a more egalitarian liberal, the idea is that justice means being non-judgmental with respect to the preferences people bring to public life.
A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.
Art is about the ‘I’ in life not the ‘we’, about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn’t acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.
My grandmother, who passed away at the beginning of November, had a core adage in her life that ‘life is not about what happens to you but about what you do with what happens to you.’ She recently had been cajoling me and challenging me to do more with my life. To lead more of a purposefully public life.
I had been overexposed in a particular way because my marriage to an extremely successful older man meant I was involved in his public life as well as my own.
What I’ve learned is that living in public life… it’s impossible to have everybody like you. No matter what you do.
Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.
In my private life, it was a disaster. In my public life, it was fantastic.
Government has crowded out the role of many social institutions, including the Church, that have been a great force for good in public life.
I don’t think public life in and of itself can destroy you. I think it’s the way people react to it, and some people are more sturdy than others… I don’t think any one faction can be blamed for a person’s self destruction – a certain amount of that has to be innate.
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