Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
~ Honore de Balzac
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
~ Rosa Luxemburg
A teacher’s day is half bureaucracy, half crisis, half monotony and one-eighth epiphany. Never mind the arithmetic.
~ Susan Ohanian
My Lord, If I attempted to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me, I should be debarred from all serious business of campaigning. I must remind your Lordship—for the last time—that so long a I retain and independent position, I shall see that no officer under my command is debarred, by attending to the futile driveling of mere quill-driving in your Lordship’s office, from attending to his first duty—which is, and always has been, so to train the private men under his command that they may, without question, beat any force opposed to them in the field.
~ Duke of Wellington
The growth and prosperity of evangel ical institutions during the 1970s and 1980s have brought with them much bureaucracy, and bureaucracy invariably smothers vision, cre ativity, and even theology. Leadership is now substantially in the hands of the managers, and as a consequence the evangelical capital is not being renewed
~ David Wells
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Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
~ Frank Dane
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
~ Charles De Gaulle
He brings disaster upon is nation who never sows a seed, or lays a brick, or weaves a garment, but makes politics his occupation.
~ Kahlil Gibran
Sooner or later politics will be faced with the task of finding a new postmodern face. A politician must become a person again, someone who trusts not only scientific representation and analysis of the world, but also the world itself. He must believe not only in sociological statistics but also in real people. He must trust not only an objective interpretation of reality, but also his own soul; no only an adopted ideology, but also his own thoughts; not only the summary reports he receives each morning, but also his own feelings.
~ Vaclav Havel, in a speech at the World Economic Forum in 1995
Let us never sacrifice our principles for anybody’s politics – not now, not ever.
~ Mike Huckabee
If you truly wished to find out what is best for the country you would listen more to those who oppose you than those who try to please you.
~ Isocrates
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
~ Abraham Lincoln
We learned once and for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a por roof; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
~ James Russell Lowell
Being in politics is like being a football coach; you have to be smart enought to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
~ Eugene McCarthy
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
~ H. L. Mencken
All politics is local.
~ Tip O’Neill
In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman.
~ Margaret Thatcher
After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.
~ Fred Thompson
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself.
~ Mark Twain
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
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Every woman should marry, and no man.
~ in Lothair
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?
Little things affect little minds.
Never complain and never explain.
Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
The secret of success is constancy of purpose.
There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics.
To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.
We all of us live too much in a circle.
We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
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~ Henry Hazlitt
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
~ John Adams
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Wyoming was the first state to allow women to vote.
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There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
~ John Adams
It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.
~ Samuel Adams
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The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867
In its reality, the state is always organized selfishness.
~ Emil Brunner, in The Divine Imperative (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947) page 460
What can be more noble than the government of the state by virtue? For then the man who rules others is not himself a slave to any passion, but has already acquired for himself all those qualities to which he is training and summoning his fellows. such a man imposes no laws upon th epopple that he does not obey himself, but puts his own life before his fellow-citizens as their law.
~ Cicero, in Republic
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
~ Gerald R. Ford, in Time magazine November 8, 1976
The booksellers at Borders and Barnes & Noble probably hate to see me coming in the door. I get a cup of coffee and spend hours browsing, and reading, and browsing, and reading, and ….
… and then, as often as not, I go home and buy what I want from Amazon.
Well, the other day I was in a B&N in Lewisville and started my usual browsing, reading, browsing eternal circle. However, I didn’t get far. I picked up Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism
Rich Karlgaard share his thoughts about the book in his recent Forbes column. Here is an excerpt:
Liberal Fascism is a must-read in this age of creeping statism–which one worries may advance with greater speed after November. Goldberg’s book is an alternative tour through the murderous 20th century, during which 100 million people were extinguished by their own governments and billions more had their liberties curtailed.Goldberg debunks the widely held view that communism was the opposite of fascism. In fact, the only thing that separated the two main branches of 20th-century totalitarianism was that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born of an international movement while the National Socialist German Workers Party was explicitly nationalist.
Both cancers were inspired by Karl Marx. Both asserted the need for a “new man” torn from religion. In his youth, writes Goldberg, “Hitler often stayed up nights writing plays about pagan Bavarians bravely fighting off Christian priests trying to impose foreign beliefs on Teutonic civilization.” Hitler also hated capitalism as much as Lenin, though Hitler was better at bending it for his own purposes.
In the U.S., “fascism lite” was embraced by Teddy Roosevelt, and much more so by the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Wilson himself wrote, in a graduate school thesis called “Congressional Government,” “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.” He wrote in another thesis, called “The State,” “Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”
Youthful hyperbole? Hardly. Campaigning for president in 1912, Wilson said, “While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it is Jefferson who said that the best government is which does as little governing as possible … But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”
Such words, of course, cleared the ground for FDR’s expansive government policies in the 1930s and 1940s and later for Nixon’s wage and price controls.
Every good history tells you something you didn’t know….
While I read the book at B&N I found plenty that I didn’t know. In fact, I just might have to order it from Amazon
Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House in D.C. One from New Jersey, another from Tennessee and the third, from Florida.
They go with a White House official to examine the fence.
The Florida contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. “Well,” he says, “I figure the job will run about $900: $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $100 profit for me.”
The Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, I can do this job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and $100 profit for me.”
The New Jersey contractor doesn’t measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, “$2,700.”
The official, incredulous, says, “You didn’t even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?”
The New Jersey contractor whispers back, “$1,000 for me, $1,000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence.”
“Done!” replies the government official.
