Public Utility Quotes

The telegraph and telephone, like the post-office system, being a necessity for the transmission of news, should be owned and operated by the government in the interest of the people.

You know, I think we ought to sell TVA.

While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a 'right' to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of 'universal service' - the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available, even in the most remote regions of the country.

Private property ought to be subservient to public uses, when necessity requires it; nevertheless, whenever any particular man's property is taken for the use of the public, the owner ought to receive an equivalent in money

Public utility pleads most forcibly for the general distribution of the Holy Scriptures.

The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex.

It is impossible to anticipate all of the misdeeds engendered by the universal conflict of human passions. They multiply at a compound rate with the growth in population and the interlacing of particular interests that cannot be directed with geometrical precision towards the public utility.

Comic strips are like a public utility. They're supposed to be there 365 days a year, and you're supposed to be able to hit the mark day after day.

What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.

Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; it's a privately owned space on the Internet.

To hinder, besides, the farmer from selling his goods at all times to the best market, is evidently to sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an idea of public utility, to a sort of reasons of state; an act of legislative authority which ought to be exercised only, which can be pardoned only in cases of the most urgent necessity.

In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the questions cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil.

Common carriers exercise a sort of public office, and have duties to perform in which the public is interested.... Their business is, therefore, affected with a public interest

The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions…

What was a profitable business in one era can become a public utility and a recognized public good in the next.

Facebook's a wonderful, incredible way to bring humanity together. They've brought together 2 billion people in the largest fictional family in history. So young people are starting to empathize with each other through Facebook across the globe. This is wonderful. However, when everyone needs Facebook because it's so successful that everyone's on it, then it starts to look like a global public utility, a public good. Same with Amazon.

The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded.

The Postal Service exists to serve every American, regardless of where you live or what you believe.

People feel overloaded, that politics has become kind of a public utility: hot- and cold-running politics any time of the day or night.

The significant regulatory impact of reclassifying broadband services is not something that should be taken lightly and should not be done without additional direction from Congress.