An honest public servant can't become rich in politics. He can only attain greatness and satisfaction by service.
— Harry S. Truman
Delicious Public Money quotations
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.


May I stress the need for courageous, intelligent, and dedicated leadership.
.. Leaders of sound integrity. Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with justice. Leaders not in love with money, but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the greatness of the cause.
It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.
The business of business should not be about money.
It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed

In private matters everyone is equal before the law.
In public matters, when it is a question of putting power and responsibility into the hands of one man rather than another, what counts is not rank or money, but the ability to do the job well.
It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.
Our party has been accused of fooling the public by calling tax increases 'revenue enhancement'. Not so. No one was fooled

Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.
If Stephen Harper took off his shirt in public, I'm not sure he'd raise any money for charity.
Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.

Normally I would not recommend a book that tells you how to make money in the stock market. Most of these books are aimed at gullible folk, and they usually make much more money for their authors than they do for the investing public.
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.

Nothing is easier than spending the public money.
It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.
Obama's the one who never worked a day in his life.
He never earned a penny that wasn't public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time.

The only reason to be in politics is public service.
There's no other reason. Frankly, if that's the best job you can get in terms of money, that's too bad, you know. Because frankly, it's not well paid, everyone knows that. So for most people it's a big sacrifice.
Give tax breaks to large corporations, so that money can trickle down to the general public, in the form of extra jobs.
All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
We [at Soros Fund Management] use options and more exotic derivatives sparingly.
We try to catch new trends early and in later stages we try to catch trend reversals. Therefore, we tend to stabilize rather than destabilize the market. We are not doing this as a public service. It is our style of making money.
The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public moneys.

No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity.
Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.
We need strong public health institutions to respond to any challenge.
We need to deal with critical infrastructure. The reality is that very little money has flowed to communities to help our first responders; to help our hospitals; to help the public health infrastructure.
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

In setting up a business under the name and meaning of the Golden Rule, I was publicly binding myself, in my business relations, to a principle which had been a real and intimate part of my family upbringing. Our idea was to make money and build business through serving the community with fair dealing and honest value.
The Executive is charged officially in the Departments under it with the disbursement of the public money, and is responsible for the faithful application of it to the purposes for which it is raised. The Legislature is the watchful guardian over the public purse. It is its duty to see that the disbursement has been honestly made.
Love is not patronizing and charity isn't about pity, it is about love.
Charity and love are the same -- with charity you give love, so don't just give money but reach out your hand instead.
The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it.
I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.