"Education is imposed ignorance."
— Noam Chomsky

""Did the men steal the papers?" Reynie asked, fearing her response.
"No, because they are fools," Sophie said bitterly. "They demanded to see the papers, and when I did not answer fast enough -- they were very frightening, you see -- they hurt me so that I was not awake. . . . When I opened my eyes they were still trying to find the papers. They did not understand how we organize the library, you see. They were angry and creating a bad mess. . . . The police were coming and the men decided they must leave. I shouted at them as they left: 'It is a free and public library! All you had to do was ask!""
— Trenton Lee Stewart (The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey)

"For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."
— Gustave Flaubert

"- Responsible parenting is NOT a crime. Responsible parenting is most valuable tool of our society."
— Mick Karabegovic

"To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices."
— Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)

"How to please the public - that's the test,
But nowadays I find I'm in a fix;
I know they're not accustomed to the best,
But they've all read so much they know the tricks.
How can we give then something fresh and new
That's serious, but entertaining too?"
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay."
— Richard Rodriguez

"Evil will remain with us, no one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans. And man will not stop destroying the world. In this regard, I have no illusions. Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all. At the very most, we can win a battle or two-- and not even that is certain. Yet I still think it makes sense to wage this war persistently... This must be done on principle, because it is the right thing to do. Or, if you like, because God wants it that way."
— Vaclav Havel

"Good Lord! who can account for the fathomless folly of the public?"
— Rudyard Kipling (The Light That Failed)

"Squidward: You may have hoodwinked everyone else in this bathwater town, but you can't fool me! I listen to public radio.

Plankton: What's that supposed to mean?"
— Squidward and Plankton

"What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem."
— Thomas Mann

"The World Bank, anxious that the last vestiges of Zimbabwe's former inclination toward socialism be abandoned, successfully urged the imposition of a token tuition charge for all grade levels. Equivalent to one U. S. dollar per year per child, this fee constitutes a burden to the poorest families, who have responded by sending only boys to classes. Too many of the girls . . . have resorted to prostitution in order to eat."
— Michael Dorris (Rooms in the House of Stone)

"A Toastmaster who doesn't want to speak is like a Musician who doesn't want to compose music. "
— Harwinder Singh Bhatia

"Joining Toastmasters and avoiding to speak is like getting married and avoiding sex."
— Harwinder Singh Bhatia

"The public, which has been wrong before and is wrong now, can accept only demons and angels on the stage"
— Theophille Gautier

"To the generations of Americans raised since World War 2, the identities of criminals such as Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, "Ma" Barker, John Dillenger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time. They were real."
— Bryan Burrough (Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34)

"The customer is always right' may have become a standard motto in the world of business, but the idea that 'the audience is always right,' has yet to make much of an impression on the world of presentation, even though for the duration of the presentation at least, the audience is the speaker's only customer."
— Max Atkinson (Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations)