"Bureaucracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... preoccupation with the technique of a career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities of our schools and colleges, still less am I a lover of shallow specialists. The unquestioned need for experts in politics is full of the very real danger that detailed preparation may give us a bureaucracy—a government by men divorced from human tradition. The churches submit to the demand for immediacy with great alacrity. Look at the so-called "liberal" churches. Reacting against an empty formalism ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... servile manner, as did, according to him, certain of his colleagues, whom he would not mention. He added that his frankness embarrassed many people, for, like all the rest, he protested against injustice and the favoritism shown to persons entirely foreign to the bureaucracy. But his indignant voice never passed beyond the little ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... program for America will not result from exclusive dependence on Federal bureaucracy. It will involve a partnership of the States and local communities, private citizens, and the Federal Government, all working together. This combined effort will advance the development of the great ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... not to be taken too lightly. Democracy indeed faces two dangers. Hobson in "Democracy After the War" has stated one of them. He says that the war will result in no easy victory for democracy, for the system of caste and bureaucracy is very likely to become fixed. Democracy therefore must be worked for, and to that end there must be a union of all types of reformers. We must play off the special interests against one another, says Hobson, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... various departements, the bureaucracy of provinces and cities, are not only amazed but ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy,"—if this should alarm any reader,—I can see no risk or possibility in England. Democracy is hot enough here, fierce enough; it is perennial, universal, clearly invincible among us henceforth. No danger it should let itself be flung in chains by sham secretaries of the Pedant species, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... ourselves the idea that the French are bad colonists: if so, France, like China and India, is improving at a pace which promises trouble. Algeria, Senegambia, and Siam should considerably modify the old judgment. Our neighbours have, and honestly own to, two grand faults—an excessive bureaucracy and a military, or rather a martinet, discipline, which interferes with civil life and which governs too much. On the other side England rules too little. She is at present between the two proverbial stools. She has lost the norm of honour, Aristocracy; and she has lost it for ever. But ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... of Commons, too, and in the bureaucracy, he had no inconsiderable strength; for Lumley never contracted the habits of personal abruptness and discourtesy common to men in power who wish to keep applicants aloof. He was bland and conciliating ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... branch of life, except in the greatest art of all. The Middle Ages had inherited a direct succession of harmonious forms, one rising out of another until the perfection was attained. Then came the Black Death, and the no less fatal scourges of Commercialism and Bureaucracy. Men's thoughts apparently became so riveted upon the grave that they must go back to the art of the dead Romans and the formalism of classical examples to keep breath in their bones at all. And even so, they informed the skeleton with a ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... salaries were increased; but Mr. BONAR LAW seemed to be more amused than alarmed at the prospect. The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER was asked point-blank whether he was satisfied with the reduction in the bureaucracy during the last six months, and replied that he was not, and had therefore appointed Committees to investigate the staffs in seven of the Departments. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... he was a bungler in the tragic art, and far too much addicted to foisting his stupid moralisings into his plays. Another article in the Westminster, on the Prussian Constitution, is worthy of remark for its thoroughness. The whole machinery of the Prussian bureaucracy is explained in a way very satisfactory ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of work might not deteriorate instead of improve if the stimulus of individual gain were withdrawn; and that the net result might probably be a diminished output consumed by a discontented people, less happy under a possibly stupid and short-sighted bureaucracy, than it is now when the chances of life at least give it the glorious uncertainty of cricket. Since the war our experiences of official control, even when working on a nation trained in individual ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... Luther's burning of the Pope's Bull they consigned a number of their pet aversions to the flames. Thus they burned a soldier's straight-jacket and corporal's cane, as well as a recent pamphlet by one Schmalz written in defense of the old Prussian bureaucracy. Rash words were uttered about the broken faith of princes. They were aimed at King Frederick William of Prussia, who had promised to give his country a constitution, but had failed to keep his word. The Wartburg festival, childish as it was ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... a great busy, overgrown, unlovely big town, which flounders under the questionable dignities of being a station of an army corps and a prefecture: Bureaucracy and Officialdom are writ large all over everything, and a poor mortal without a handle to his name, or a ribbon in his buttonhole, is looked upon as a sort of outcast when he enters a cafe, and accordingly he waits a long time ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... than the officer and official. Amongst us he is looked upon almost as a second-class citizen compared with the other two. What in England is valued as only a means to an end is regarded by us as an end in itself. The spirit of that rigid bureaucracy, of which Prince Bismarck has already complained, is still unfortunately with few exceptions the prevailing spirit in our Empire, from the highest to the lowest circles; the lack of appreciation of the importance of economic life is the cause of the low esteem in which the industrial classes are ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... respect to the nation. Offices of all kinds are multiplied to reward partisans; the brute force of the sewerage and lower strata of the mob obtains large representation, first in the lower offices, and at last in Senates; and Bureaucracy raises its bald head, bristling with pens, girded with spectacles, and bunched with ribbon. The art of Government becomes like a Craft, and its guilds tend to become exclusive, as ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... altogether indifferent to their varying desires. Such a scheme of government was therefore no more than an attempt to stand the pyramid on its apex: Mr. Adams's administration, supported chiefly by those whose aspirations were for an honest and capable bureaucracy, and who could not or would not face the rude questionings of democracy, ended with his first four years, and went out in such a whirlwind of partisan opposition as brought in, by reaction, the infamous "spoils system" that at the end ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... selling governorships; and, in fact, Seneca intimates that under bad emperors governorships were sold. Of course, the tyranny was felt most at Rome, where it was present; but when Caligula or Caracalla made a tour in the provinces, it was like the march of the pestilence. The absence of a regular bureaucracy, practically controlling, as the Russian bureaucracy does, the personal will of the Emperor, must have made government better under Trajan, but much worse under Nero. The aggregation of land in the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the living, but also to honour the dead. The care of what was magniloquently termed their "estate" fell to our manager, S——. It was he who put into a little canvas bag all the papers and small possessions found on the victims. He devoted days and nights to a kind of funereal bureaucracy, inevitable even under the fire of the enemy. His occupation, moreover, was not exempt from moral difficulties. Thus he found in the pocket of one dead man a woman's card which it was impossible to ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... the office-seekers, who thought it the best plan to have occupiers of posts ousted to give them an opening; so they maligned and even accused chief officials with a freedom unknown in other countries where the bureaucracy is a sacred institution—as within a generation it has become here. Lincoln rebuked one of these covetous vexers by saying gravely ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... of pageants was spontaneous and national. "It is time," said Chesterton, "for an army of amateurs; for England is perishing of the professionals." Vitality seemed to be flowing back into national life, but Bureaucracy does not love vitality. Agitated Town Councils met and stopped the tea-parties; fought against street markets through which allotment holders could sell their produce cheaply; put heavy rates on land reclaimed and buildings ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the same burden of bureaucracy, but less backing and filling. There is a complete government monopoly. Whoever commits the crime of leasing telephone service to his neighbors may be sent to jail for six months. Here, too, the Postmaster General has been supreme. ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... centralized political apparatus or bureaucracy that attempts to plan, direct and administer the political, economic, ideological and ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... the impediment was a ruling caste highly skilled in the governmental function and generally trusted by a majority of the populace—a ruling caste firmly intrenched in the House of Lords and scarcely less powerful in the House of Commons. In France it was a bureaucracy so securely protected by law and custom that nothing short of a political cataclysm could shake it. In Germany and Italy it was an aristocracy buttressed by laws cunningly designed to nullify the numerical superiority ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... struggle which will confront the public of this country for the achievement of political and industrial democracy when the war is over. The economic roots of Militarism and of the confederacy of reactionary influences which are found supporting it—Imperialism, Protectionism, Conservatism, Bureaucracy, Capitalism—are subjected to a critical analysis. The safeguarding and furtherance of the interests of Improperty and Profiteering are exhibited as the directing and moulding influences; of domestic and foreign policy, and their exploitation of other more disinterested ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... feet again and began storming up and down the room. "A full three quarters of our employed working at nothing jobs, gobbledygook jobs, non-producing jobs, make-work jobs, red-tape bureaucracy jobs. At a time when the nation is supposedly in a breakneck economic competition with the Soviet Complex, we put our best brains into advertising, entertainment and sales, while they put theirs ...
— Subversive • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... closed its doors to its kinsmen in Cape Colony—for you must not forget that the oldest Transvaalers, from President Kruger downwards, are ex-Cape Colonists, and quondam British subjects—and imported a bureaucracy of Hollanders to plait a whip wherewith ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... departments decisions which trench upon the legislative functions of parliament. The trend of hostile opinion is to regard parliament as an unnecessary middleman, and to advocate in its stead a sort of plebiscitary bureaucracy, a constitution under which legislation drafted by officials would be demanded, sanctioned, or rejected by direct popular vote, and would be discussed, like the Insurance Bill, in informal conferences outside, rather than inside, parliament; while administration by a vast army of ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... university, under all the autocracy and bureaucracy of the German state, is more democratic in its organization than our own. Its faculty is a self-governing body, electing to its own membership. The Rectorship is an honor conferred for the year on some faculty member for superior worth and ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... existed to register the edicts of their tyrant, and if need be, destroy each other, or any one else, by judicial murders, the willing tools of imperial cruelty. The government was administered (at least since the time of Diocletian) by an official bureaucracy, of which Professor Goldwin Smith well says, 'the earth swarmed with the consuming hierarchy of extortion, so that it was said that they who received taxes were more than those who paid them.' The free middle class ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... reign, in the other sense, of silly minor revolutions, which, till the end, came to nothing, and then came to something only less absurd than the Russian revolution of the other day, though fortunately less disastrous;[331] of bureaucracy of the corrupt and shabby character which seemed to cling to the whole regime; and of remarkable vying between two distinguished men of letters, Guizot and Thiers, as to which should do most to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of the speeches that followed he too may have a frigid disillusionment when the Bill comes up against the "interests" in Committee. Mr. T.P. O'CONNOR, on behalf of Liverpool, described it as the product of "an old bureaucracy and a young Parliamentarian," and Mr. RENWICK declared that, if it passed, the Manchester Ship Canal would be "between the devil and the deep sea," surely an uncalled-for ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... Florence, Siena, Leghorn, Osnabrueck, Muenster, Bremen, and Hamburg were now capitals of actual French departments, the total number of which reached one hundred and thirty. They were directly administered by a central bureaucracy as ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... monopolies, in the too rapid growth of fungus millionnaires, in the increasing number of well educated idlers, in the sinister prominence of the saloon in politics, in the tendency of the country to submit to bureaucracy, in the transformation of the national Senate into a club of rich men, housed and fed at the national expense, in the change of the House of Representatives into a huddle of clerks to register the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various |
