Public Conversation Quotes

Don't make election popularity largely a matter of which candidate hires the most creative and effective propagandists. Insist that it be, instead, a running conversation with the public.

Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.

I think [there's] the opportunity for - I almost said President Clinton, and soon I will - but for Hillary Clinton to address that, and for the public sphere to address that in a way that they haven't. We started a conversation in the last few years on race that we desperately needed to have.

I think we'll have a bigger conversation first within the Republican Party, then with the American people about what's the proper role of the federal government, i do hope that Common Core will be one more, one more reason for us to have this bigger debate, this bigger conversation about the proper role of the federal government in local education.

It is important to keep protesting, to keep forcing a conversation in the public arena. In any case, when you know what the right thing to do is, or that something must be said, it can be immoral and dangerous not to act.

No one is calling any of these designers racist. The act itself is racist. There were more black models working in the Seventies than there are in 2013. This a time when silence is not acceptable at all. If the conversation cannot be had publicly in our industry, then there is something inherently wrong.

It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

Most non-New Yorkers, finding themselves within hearing range of strangers' conversation, think it's nice to pretend they didn't hear. But many New Yorkers think it's nice to toss in a relevant comment.

I think you could argue that President Obama could have watched a little cable news... I do think that there is value in understanding where the conversation is and having a little less detachment where the popular conversation is.

You see people on the street, talking to themselves, and you're like, 'What are they talking about?' I'm interested in that.

If you look at the way all of the new reform movements dedicated to the public interest are living and thriving on the Internet, I do think there is still some considerable hope that the full participation of individuals in that conversation of democracy can once again restore the integrity of the way our democracy works.

There was never a moment when I was like, 'I'm going to enter the public conversation on the importance of female nudity.'

It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant bullshit. There isn't yet that public conversation about 9/11.

In an election like this one [in 2016], not only are voters dissatisfied, but where the foundations of our economy, our democracy, our ecosystem, and international war and peace are really crumbling and are really at grave risk for failing in many ways, we need desperately to have an honest public conversation about both the track record of where we've been, what are the critical problems we are facing and what it will take to solve them.

I want my work to influence public conversation, to turn heads, and to bear witness to this problem that's raging in our cities. If journalism helps me with that, I'll draw on journalism... and I'm not going to worry too much if academics get troubled over that distinction.

Of course sports and politics intersect, and those conversations belong, more than anywhere else, on a network devoted to sports.

Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.

For an academic to launch a public conversation about journalistic integrity, the role of religion in society, scholarship and faith is a dream come true. These are the kinds of things that we sit around talking to each other about in our dusty libraries. To see these conversations take place in popular culture is the best thing that could have ever happened.

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times?