The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ''significant literature'' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

I never know when I press these whether I am going to blow up Massachusetts or start the project.

The Public is a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.

Yes; the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

The worthiest man to be known, and for a pattern to be presented to the world, he is the man of whom we have most certain knowledge. He hath been declared and enlightened by the most clear-seeing men that ever were; the testimonies we have of him are in faithfulness and sufficiency most admirable.