If you left it up to the public, there would be hardly any art. Certainly there would be no big art, such as the modernistic sculptures that infest many public parks. You almost never hear members of the public saying, 'Hey! Let's all voluntarily chip in and pay a sculptor upwards of $100,000 to fill this park space with what appears to be the rusted remains of a helicopter crash!' It takes concerted government action to erect one of those babies.
BARRY, DAVE, Should Government Force Taxpayers to Admire Art as Well as Pay for It?, December 1990We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.
CROCKETT, DAVID, Congressman 1827-35The seeking of opportunities for expending huge sums of public money, upon the theory that this will prime the economic pump, ignores the fact that the priming water is an exhaustion of the living water of the public credit...So far as history shows, every such borrowing government has had to repay either by a mortgage on the social development of the next generation, or by desperate measures of repudiation through inflation in its own generation.
HOOVER, HERBERT, The Challenge to Liberty, Chapter VII, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934