"Bureaucracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great a secret within the Bureau as it was to the man in the street. At one period, Ronny wondered if it were possible that this was a department which had been lost in the wilderness of boondoggling that goes on in any great bureaucracy. Had Section G been set up a century or so ago and then forgotten by those who had originally thought there was a need for it? In the same way that it is usually more difficult to get a statute off the lawbooks than it was originally to pass ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... this, it is not yet easy to say. If the German defeat be emphatic enough and dramatic enough, the question may answer itself—how's the best way to be rid of the danger of the recurrence of a military bureaucracy? But in any event, this thing must be killed forever—somehow. I think that a firm insistence on this is the main task that mediation will bring. The rest will be ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... 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 new life. In such new creations of the aged ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... services in the Catholic churches at which fiery patriotic speeches were delivered. Similar demonstrations of mourning were held in the synagogues. An appeal sent out broadcast by the circle of patriotic Jewish Poles reminded the Jews of the anti-Jewish hatred of the Russian bureaucracy, and called upon them "to clasp joyfully the brotherly hand held forth by them (the Poles), to place themselves under the banner of the nation whose ministers of religion have in all churches spoken of us in words of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... came which staggered Europe and set the world wondering. The Revolution had broken out in Russia,—the Czar and Czarina became practically prisoners, the Russian bureaucracy fell, and although the Revolution was practically bloodless, that great Empire was reduced to a state of chaos. Of course our newspapers made it appear as though everything were in our favour; that the old days of corruption and Czardom were ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... bedroom, a soldier typewritist in another, officers at work in others. One realized that they could pack up everything and move in the time it takes to toss enough clothes into a bag to spend a night away from home. Apparently, when the French fought they left red tape behind with the bureaucracy. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... to the "princes'" laws was not only treasonable but sacrilegious as well. This fact goes far to explain the atrocities committed with the consent of German public opinion. William the Damned and his bureaucracy were believed to be above all moral or human law, and from the earthly standpoint were infallible and irresponsible. Their orders must ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... should see the faces of the municipal employes who extort these tributes. God alone knows from what classes of the populace they are recruited; certain it is that their physiognomy reflects their miserable calling. One can endure the militarism of Germany and the bureaucracy of Austria; but it is revolting to see decent Italian countryfolk at the mercy of these uncouth savages, veritable cave-men, whose only intelligible expression is one of malice striving to break through a crust of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Bureaucracy and autocracy are evils resulting from an undeveloped civilization, and have no place in a community where selfishness ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... monarchists and reactionaries, their hope being the restoration of tsarism. Like most of their kind, they are bitter Jew-baiters. Their pamphlet is entirely typical of Russian anti-Semitism, particularly in its reckless disregard of truth. I find here reproduced the charge that "the Soviet bureaucracy is almost entirely controlled by Jews and Jewesses." Not only so, but it is charged that the non-Bolshevist Socialist parties are mainly composed of Jews. The pamphlet ends with the statement, "the Russian state is actually dominated ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... leave its management to the school board and teachers. It is highly desirable that every encouragement should be given toward making teaching a life profession, but as teaching becomes professionalized it tends, like every other calling, to become more or less of a bureaucracy. It is essential that educational methods should be determined by and be in charge of educators who are trained for such service, but if they get the idea, as sometimes seems unfortunately the case, that it is the business of the people ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... overhear some of his impertinences, so I hunted out my biggest sjambok and lay in wait for Mr. Le Foy. I told him that he was a representative of the sovereign people, that I was a member of an effete bureaucracy, and that it would be most painful if unpleasantness arose between us. But, I added, I was prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice my official career to my private feelings, and if he dared to use such ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... threatened that there would be a general strike of Members of Parliament unless their 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
... her promise: she would do better with primitive Communism. Her city populations may be as capable of Democracy as our own (it is, alas! not saying much); but the overwhelming mass of peasants to whom the Tsar is a personal God will for a long time to come make his bureaucracy irresistible. As against Russian civilization German and Austrian civilization is our civilization: there is no getting over that. A constitutional kingship of Poland and a sort of Caliphate of the Slavs in remapped southeastern ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 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 ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... to Socialise them. There is no need to withdraw one diamond-headed nail from the carpet; or one golden teaspoon from the tray. It is only necessary to call it an official residence, like 10 Downing-street. I think it is not at all improbable that this Plutocracy, pretending to be a Bureaucracy, will be attempted or achieved. Our wealthy rulers will be in the position which grumblers in the world of sport sometimes attribute to some of the "gentlemen" players. They assert that some of these are paid like any professional; only their pay is called their expenses. This system might ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... for safety. The outburst 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 erected by hard work. Town families living ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Therefore, pari passu, an Empire which is so absolutely autocratic that the monarch is its one mainspring of government, grows weaker as it descends from father to son. Its one chance of conserving some of its pristine strength is to develop a bureaucracy which, if inspired by the ideas and methods of earlier members of the dynasty, may continue to realize them in a crystallized system of administration. This chance the Middle Assyrian Kingdom never was at any ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... for the battleship, she appeared because the fact that a Station in just this orbit was about to commence operations was news important enough to cross the Solar System and push through many strata of bureaucracy. The heads of the recently elected North American government became suddenly, fully aware of ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... 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 ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... accomplished by the wholesale suppression of democratic rights, and involves an organised manufacture of imperialistic emotion which ends by delegating the authority of the State to a reactionary triumvirate of bureaucracy, jingoism and vulgarity (or Tory, Landowner and Journalist). The guarantees of democracy, the rights of free thought and free speech, every sort of civil liberty and every defence against the servile state, will all ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... Self-Development of every Nation, and the similar right of the Individual, of the smaller Self, so far as is consistent with the welfare of the larger Self of the Nation. The forces which make for the prolongation of autocracy—the rule of one—and the even deadlier bureaucracy—the rule of a close body welded into an iron system—these have been gathered together in the Central Powers of Europe—as of old in Ravana—in order that they may be destroyed; for the New Age cannot be opened until the Old ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... government of his day. Though the Hegelian system has been the fruitful mother of many liberal ideas, there can be no doubt that Hegel's influence, in his own lifetime, was an effective support of Prussian bureaucracy.] ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... see much difference. We're both trying to overthrow a vicious bureaucracy." He laughed again. "You hate them as much as ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... making in the hearts of the Russian people. The books of Dostoevski and Tolstoi point directly to the Gospel, and although Russia is theoretically a Christian nation, no country needs real Christianity more than she. The tyranny of the bureaucracy, the corruption of fashionable society, the sufferings of the humble classes, the hollow formalism of the Church, make Russia particularly ripe for the true Gospel—just as true to-day as when given to the world in Palestine. Sixty years ago Gogol ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... of her soldiers were killed and wounded, startled the world suddenly, in February, 1917, by casting out the Czar and establishing a provisional government, which purported to be a government by the people and not by the bureaucracy. The dramatic events of the first days of the revolution are described in the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... Berkeley in a paper contributed to "Home Rule Problems," have lucidly and wittily described the wonderful collection of sixty-seven irresponsible and unrelated Boards nominated by the Chief Secretary, or Lord-Lieutenant, which, with the official services beneath them, constitute the colonial bureaucracy of Ireland; the extravagance of the judicial and other salaries, and the total lack of any central control worthy of the name. By omitting a number of insignificant little bureaux, the figure 67, according ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... sad to think that what goes for public opinion in India did not generally see the wisdom of the Viceroy's appointment. There were not lacking indeed hireling organs, notoriously in the pay of a tyrannous bureaucracy, who more than hinted that His Excellency was a fool, a dreamer of dreams, a doctrinaire, and, worst of all, a trifler with the lives of men. 'The Viceroy's Excellence Gazette,' published in Calcutta, was at pains to thank 'Our beloved Viceroy for once ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... coaling stations, and floating over a fifth of the globe the British flag." Could anything be more exasperating? And these "absent-minded beggars" the English, without any forethought or science or design, without Prussian organization or Prussian bureaucracy and statecraft, had simply walked into this huge inheritance without knowing what they were doing! It certainly was most provoking. But what England had done why should not Germany do—and do it indeed much ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... new proposal had the charm of a school-boy's first dark-lantern. Socialism ceased to be an open revolution, and became a plot. Functions were to be shifted, quietly, unostentatiously, from the representative to the official he appointed; a bureaucracy was to slip into power through the mechanical difficulties of an administration by debating representatives; and since these officials would by the nature of their positions constitute a scientific ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... House of Commons, upon which stress has already been laid. Indeed, there is abundant evidence to show that in conjunction with the imaginary instability of the electorate, the debasement of elections is weakening the faith of many in representative institutions. An efficient bureaucracy is now being advocated by a writer so distinguished as Mr. Graham Wallas, as the best safeguard against the excesses of an unstable and ignorant democracy. There is no need to undervalue the importance ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... are 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, work for industrial ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... going concern. Hence arises the economic problem of Austria, which is certainly grave. Here is a State which persistently refuses to live on its income, and prints off paper money to make up its deficiency. A highly expensive bureaucracy five times as large as is needed for little Austria pays itself first, and as for the rest of the population the devil can take the hindmost. The money-printing press works night and day. No loans, no foreign dole, will stop ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... loth to occupy in Yugoslavia. In Germany, moreover, many of the States used to be independent, while in Yugoslavia this was only the case with Serbia and Montenegro. Centralism would tend to obliterate the tribal divisions, but on the other hand it brings in its train bureaucracy, which is slow, cumbrous and often corrupt; it demands unusually good central institutions and first-rate communications, neither of which are as yet in a satisfactory state. The constitution has arrived at a compromise between the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... addition to all the functions already accumulated in its hands (education, state-supported religions, defence of the territory, &c.), would mean to create a new instrument of tyranny. State capitalism would only increase the powers of bureaucracy and capitalism. True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... say, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Here, supposedly, would have been the conditions under which the original ideas of Marx and his collaborator would have flourished, but the Party moved in its heavy bureaucracy ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... despotism the aristocracy loses all its powers, and, except for the bureaucracy and "King's friends," there is no privileged class unless the King is a weak man and under the thumb of his court (e.g., contrast the France of Louis XIV with that ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... fall. The Roman Catholic, with his belief in the infallible Church, as the interpreter of God's spirit, which is nothing more than a belief in the inspiration of the majority, or even a belief in the inspiration of a bureaucracy, is the prey of this delusion. The Protestant, too, with his legal creed, built up of texts and precedents, in which the argumentative dicta of Apostles and Evangelists are as weighty and important as the words ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 hands of a few great land-holders evidently continued, and under ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... order to accomplish so much, the Transvaal has 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 ...
— 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
... participation in the second and third partitions of Poland, which took place in 1783 and 1795 respectively. These external successes, or rather acts of spoliation, were, notwithstanding, counter-balanced at home by a degeneracy alike of the civil bureaucracy and of the army. The country internally, both as regards morale and effectiveness, had sunk far below its level under Friedrich the Great. This showed itself during the great Napoleonic wars, when Prussia had to undergo more than one humiliation at the hands of Buonaparte, ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... delicate and well-bred satire that no one, except the originals, would think of taking offence. People are willing, for the sake of the entertainment which it affords, to forgive a little quiet malice at their neighbors' expense. The members of the provincial bureaucracy are drawn with the same firm but delicate touch, and everything has that beautiful air of reality which proves ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... combating heresy. But he remains the indefatigable and supreme head of the State. "I am never fully satisfied with my efforts and my despatch of business. Work I must for the welfare of all, and the root of the matter is in effort." He controls a highly trained bureaucracy not unlike that of British India to-day, and his system of government is wonderfully effective so long as it is informed by his untiring energy ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... Africa, Chad has benefited the least from the 50% devaluation of their currencies on 12 January 1994. Despite an increase in external financial aid and favorable price increases for cotton - the primary source of foreign exchange - the corrupt and enfeebled government bureaucracy continues to dampen economic enterprise by neglecting payments to domestic suppliers and public sector salaries. Oil production in the Lake Chad area remains a distant prospect and the subsistence-driven economy probably will continue to limp ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... bureaucracy where men rise and fall not by the votes of their fellow citizens but by back stairs intrigue. The German office-holder fears the spies of his rivals. I often said to Germans holding high office during the war, "This strain is breaking ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 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 send on to his family, and in another case, a collection of ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... distinguished: the literary, the agricultural, the artisan and the trading class. Hereditary nobility, in the European sense, scarcely exists, and the possession of an hereditary title gives in itself no special privileges. Official position is more highly esteemed than birth and the bureaucracy takes the place of the aristocracy in the west. There are, nevertheless, besides personal decorations for merit, such as the yellow jacket, five hereditary rewards for merit; these last only for a fixed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... I was "too proud to fight," though if I went about saying that I was ashamed of my country I might; for when I think of my country I think of no group of politicians, financiers, or propagandists, no bureaucracy or particular section of opinion, but of our people as a whole. But unquestionably we were unpopular with the masses of Europeans. A sentence taken out of its context was misconstrued into a catch-phrase indicating the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer |
