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“But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Accountability and self-responsibility are critical to our success in personal, professional and public life. However, we often look for those character traits in others, rather than inculcating them in ourselves.”
― Vishwas Chavan, VishwaSutras: Universal Principles For Living: Inspired by Real-Life Experiences

“As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources, and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxicâ€� full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media. Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it.”
― Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution

“Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others.”
― Alain de Botton

“Our public life is largely premised on an exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the drives of the acquisitive society, like he serpent, seduce into believing there are securities apart from the reality of God.”
― Walter Brueggemann

“The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus.”
― Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

“Many people say the right thing in public because they do not want to be seen as mean. However, it is what we say in private, to our best friends, supporters, and colleagues, that truly forms us. It makes up our energy field and defines us. Although we think people do not know what we say and do, others do know. They often find out. And even if they don’t know the specific details, they can sense our integrity or lack of it.”
― Donna Goddard, Love's Longing

“I would encourage everybody listening to involve themselves in public life and politics to some extent. You know, democracy doesn't just function by itself. It needs people to make it work. And so whether that means working in the polls, whether that means joining a party, whether that means running for a local office, whether that means helping somebody else run for local office, think of politics as something that you can be in and you can be part of and you can play a role in because that's actually what will determine the outcome.”
― Anne Applebaum

“There were three sides to a marriage: public and private and who-fucking-knows, one lived and one performed and one a thundering mystery.”
― Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel

“A Lenina le resultaba muy inquietante. En primer lugar, su manía de hacerlo todo en privado. Lo que en la práctica significaba no hacer nada en absoluto. Porque ¿qué podía hacerse en privado?”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I”
― Adrienne Rich

“Hollywood publicists, whom you're told you must have and who cost around $6000 per month, tell you what you should act like, look like, talk like â€� how you should respond to the press. They prey on fear and manipulate actors by threatening: 'Oh, the studio will be really upset with you if you don't do this.”
― Rose McGowan, Brave

“Indeed, fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism. It is certainly a fundamental point on which fascist regimes differed most profoundly from authoritarian conservatism, and even more profoundly from classical liberalism.

There was no room in this vision of obligatory national unity for either free-thinking persons or for independent, autonomous subcommunities. Churches, Freemasonry, class-based unions or syndicates, political parties� all were suspect as subtracting something from the national will.121 Here were grounds for infinite conflict with conservatives as well as the Left.

In pursuit of their mission to unify the community within an all-consuming public sphere, fascist regimes dissolved unions and socialist parties. This radical amputation of what had been normal worker representation, encased as it was in a project of national fulfillment and managed economy, alienated public opinion less than pure military or police repression, as in traditional dictatorships. And indeed the fascists had some success in reconciling some workers to a world without unions or socialist parties, those for whom proletarian solidarity against capitalist bosses was willingly replaced by national identity against other peoples.

Brooding about cultural degeneracy was so important a fascist issue that some authors have put it at the center. Every fascist regime sought to control the national culture from the top, to purify it of foreign influences, and make it help carry the message of national unity and revival.
Decoding the cultural messages of fascist ceremonies, films, performances, and visual arts has today become the most active field of research on fascism. The “reading� of fascist stagecraft, however ingenious, should not mislead us into thinking that fascist regimes succeeded in establishing monolithic cultural homogeneity. Cultural life in fascist regimes remained a complex patchwork of official activities, spontaneous activities that the regimes tolerated, and even some illicit ones. Ninety percent of the films produced under the Nazi regime were light entertainment without overt propaganda content (not that it was innocent, of course). A few protected Jewish artists hung on remarkably late in Nazi
Germany, and the openly homosexual actor and director Gustav Gründgens remained active to the end.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“The aesthetic education offers a "subjective" transformation of each person's private war of conflicting drives into a knack for making beautiful public peace offerings.”
― Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

“The great attraction of public life seemed to be its expanding frontiers, its flexible horizons. It was a realm of infinite possibility, a task that was never concluded, a challenge that never abated.”
― P.V. Narasimha Rao, The insider

“For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience... But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!”
― Virginia Woolf

“In neoliberal society, the capitalist market is no longer imagined as a distinct arena where goods are valued and exchanged; rather, the market is, or ideally should be, the basis for all of society.â€� Politics is no longer primarily a negotiation of where the line between public and private falls (as in classical liberalism), for neoliberalism “works to erase this line between public and private and to create an entire society â€� in fact, an entire world â€� based on private, market competition. â€� Consequently, contemporary politics take shape around questions of how best to promote competition.”
― Rodney Clapp, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age

“Many people say the right thing in public because they do not want to be seen as mean. However, it is what we say in private, to our best friends, supporters, and colleagues, that truly forms us. It makes up our energy field and defines us.”
― Donna Goddard, Love's Longing