Public Purpose Quotes

Government can contribute to a shared sense of purpose on the part of the citizenry; that's its highest and best application.

A free Net may depend on some wisely developed and implemented locks and a community ethos that secures the keys to those locks among groups with shared norms and a sense of public purpose rather than in the hands of one gatekeeper.

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

Government should not tell you what to do unless there's a compelling public purpose.

Natural resources must be so distributed, by way of auction or otherwise, that they serve a larger public purpose.

The function of government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation toward the end for which the commonwealth has come into being.

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.

We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.

Considering community support and cost-benefit analysis, I have supported earmarks for projects of high public purpose involving such areas as higher education, alternative energy, transportation, medical research and military infrastructure.

The case decided on Thursday, though, seemed promising to takings fans because it wasn't about compensation. It was about the requirement that any government taking must have a 'public purpose.'

One answer is that the town's elected officials thought that the project served a public purpose and that the various subsidies and favors were worth the price. But they may or may not have thought this.

The director of the institute where I was working apologized about these young, enthusiastic researchers when the World Bank visited because he was afraid the institute would lose the World Bank consultancies.I went back home and started the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology—an extremely elaborate name for the tiny institute that I started in my mother’s cow shed. My parents handed over family resources and said, “Put them to public purpose.” That’s how I survived.