T. S. Eliot Quotes

I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.

The language of the moment or, as it were, the language of the order in which we live, is the image. I felt that if I wanted to commune with the public, I should best do so through the language of image. It's a conscious embrace of a contradiction.

I always have a very strong sense of shaming oneself, and you can do that a lot in the public eye, so it's best avoided at all costs I think.

Every piece of entertainment is made with the idea that 'This is going to be terrific' and 'This is the best thing I've ever done' and then it hits the public and then the public tells you whether it's good or bad.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.

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.

When political and business leaders tell the public - any public - 'We don't trust you to make the right decision' - they prejudice that electorate against the very proposals they want it to accept and undermine public confidence in themselves.

It's great - that's the best part about being famous is that people want to get to know me. People come up to me and introduce themselves, and I make friends, and then I meet their friends. It seems like I have a very happy and comfortable social life, which is something I never had when I was younger.

The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.

I mean the idea of this is that it's a good thing for the public to hear interviews like this and that there will be an inevitable amount of fewer interviews if people that the press talks to wind up thinking, well, it's not really a CBS correspondent.

I haven't read a review of one of my films for the best part of 10 years.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

... politics of meaning

In polling, truth is what people perceive.

What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.

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.

The political value of a word must be measured not in terms of its linguistic coherence but in the way people use it.

Reality is complex, but the politicians and the public demand simple answers.

History is the default methodology for thinking through the world for most people.

The public has been told repeatedly that terrorism is 'evil,' which it undoubtedly is, and that 'evildoers' are responsible for it, which doubtless they are. But beyond these justifiable condemnations, there is a historical void.

There's stigmas attached to anything that makes you, in the public's eye, seem weak. So of course, you know, you're in a business where your image, and the way people perceive you, you are taught, is important.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that the public is more mistrustful - the debate will always garner that kind of traction because anything the BBC does is always in the spotlight.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.