In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, it has suffered in more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder.
Security is freedom from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) from external forces. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, and any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change by its environment.
There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.
Attributed to Douglas MacArthur; reported in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations (1964), p. 316; reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre Observe degree, priority and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order.
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), Act I, scene 3, line 85.
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, Fiat Voluntas Tua, Ch. 29 (1959)