"Bureaucracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... India, bureaucracy, democracy, sedition, education, politics and Durbars:—the world with all its tumult and its roaring passes clean over their heads, unheeded, unobserved: for them the noise and bustle do not matter, do not trouble: they ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... at least partially justifiable opposition both to certain of the methods advocated by Civil Service Reformers and to certain of the Civil Service Reformers themselves. The pet shibboleths of the opponents of the reform were that the system we proposed to introduce would give rise to mere red-tape bureaucracy, and that the reformers were pharisees. Neither statement was true. Each ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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 and singular loftiness ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... white" by the herculean efforts she had made. But Japan's position was the stronger, and peace was more important for Russia than for her antagonist. The Japanese were more clear-sighted than the selfish Russian bureaucracy; and they realized that they had gained so much already that there was nothing to be won ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... example of pettish bureaucracy, the officiousness of the jack-in-office. Except for the nuisance, it didnt particularly matter. When Mr Le ffacase read my contribution I knew there would be no concern in future whether it was handwritten, typewritten, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... 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 new life. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... muddle-headed despatches, I am now promoted to writing short skeleton sermons on politics, which, duly filled out and fattened with official nutriment, will one day astonish the Irish Office, and make one of the Nestors of bureaucracy exclaim, 'See how Danesbury has got ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of drawing up reports long enough to outlast the hopes of the people, who, after waiting and starving in enforced idleness, and seeing nothing come of all these official researches, would lose heart and faith in the Revolution and abandon the field to the reactionaries. The new bureaucracy would end by making expropriation hateful ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... point. Yet in the midst of these huge designs he was able to attend to the most trifling details of economy. His love of order was so precise that he may be said to have applied the method of a banker's office to the conduct of a state. It was he who invented Bureaucracy by creating a special class of paid clerks and secretaries of departments. Their duty consisted in committing to books and ledgers the minutest items of his private expenditure and the outgoings of his public purse; in noting the details of the several taxes, so as to be able to present ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... 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 ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... are 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 by the Jewish nation." There is no argument in the pamphlet, ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... and quietly reorganized the army, the bureaucracy, the very palace Guard. We have undermined the government's power, until when the word is passed to strike the blow, a honey-combed system will crumble under its own weight. When Karyl calls on his ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... morbid character of the intellectual species. In the bourgeois caste the power of organisation and expression of ideas has reached almost monstrous proportions. The equilibrium of life is destroyed by a bureaucracy of the mind which thinks itself much superior to the simple worker. Certainly no one can deny that it has its uses; it collects and classifies thoughts in its pigeon-holes and puts them to various purposes, but the idea rarely occurs ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... I apprehend, be said without offense that there is no depth of depravity below the ordinary reach of the Russian bureaucracy; but this organisation finds itself constrained, after all, to use circumspection and set some limits on individual excursions beyond the bounds of decency and humanity, so soon as these excesses touch the common or joint interest of the organisation. Any excess ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... that, if unchecked, it might result in depriving the landed proprietors of cheap labor. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, while Minister of the Interior, openly opposed it, and at one time the Russian periodical press was not allowed even to discuss it. When at last it was permitted, the bureaucracy managed it so badly, and paid so little attention to the distribution and proper settlement of the emigrants in Siberia, that nearly nineteen per cent. of them returned, practically ruined, to their old homes in European ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... and the Church. For William fixed the type of the successful English mediaeval king, of whom Henry II. and Edward I. were the most notable examples afterwards. It was, in fact, with him that the struggle towards monarchical bureaucracy began, which was checked by the barons, who extorted Magna Charta from King John, and afterwards by the revolt headed by Simon de Montfort in Henry III.'s reign; was carried on vigorously by Edward I., and finally successfully finished by Henry VII. after the long faction-fight ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... outdoor tea-parties with ropes stretched across the streets 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 in single rooms ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 Europe, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... everywhere men devoted to their service, working from morning till evening, and finding time, notwithstanding the mutiplicity of their daily labours, to occupy themselves with literature and serious studies. India is governed bureaucratically, but this bureaucracy differs in more than one respect from ours in Europe. To the public servant in Europe one day is like another; some great revolution, some European war, is needed to disturb the placid monotony of his existence. In India it is not so. ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... we take such things for granted as part of our system or want of system. But in Germany the moment you cross the frontier a thousand trifles make you feel that you are a unit in an army, drilled and kept under by the bureaucracy and the police. It surprises you to see an unmanageable crowd in a train or on a steamer, much as it would surprise you to see soldiers swarm at will into a troopship. You expect them to march precisely, each man to his place. And in Germany this nearly always happens in civil life; ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... denied by an impartial political observer." An up-to-date illustration of the bias appears in the address of the Chairman of the National Congress of 1906. "The educated classes," he says, "... now see clearly that the [British] bureaucracy is growing frankly selfish and openly opposed to their political aspirations." While regretting that feeling and the prejudice that often mingles with it, let those interested in India at least understand ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... 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 decrees of greedy capital, in the chronic ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... warfare against Austria and Germany, during which millions 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
... Slavonic peoples. It was the people in Russia which moved the court, against its will, to go to war, single-handed, with Turkey, in 1877. In the prosecution of the war, the abuses which were brought to light among officials, civil and military, heightened the indignation which the corrupt "bureaucracy"—the administration by departments, each under its chief—provoked. The failure to gather the harvest of the war, of which Russia was deprived by diplomacy, increased the popular unrest. A party of socialistic democracy, a revolutionary party, had developed itself as early as 1874. The way had ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... seminaries was Christian, nay, military. Not a few members of their faculties or boards of governors were discharged police officers or superannuated soldiers, and at the head of the seminary in Vilna, the metropolis of Russian Jewry, stood an apostate Jew! They became, as it were, infirmaries of the bureaucracy, where, at the expense of the Jews, it could stow away anyone who had proved a failure or was no longer useful. The Government also undertook to provide the graduates with positions, patronage which rendered the students insolently independent of their coreligionists, and encouraged some of them ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... into which the exponents of settled religions are apt to 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 of the Saviour Himself, falls under this delusion. I read the other day a ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unrest. Education, which we gave to India and were bound to give, had inevitably bred political aspiration, and an intelligensia had grown up hungry for political rights and powers. Simultaneously the voracious demands of a centralised bureaucracy for reports and returns had left the district officer little leisure for that close touch with the people which in the past meant confidence and goodwill. Political restlessness had already for ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... from 1870. The unification of 1870 was far from complete. The German national idea still awaits development in the direction of racial unity, political unity, and constitutional freedom. It is Prussia that bars the way in all these directions, Prussia, which, in itself not a nation but a military bureaucracy, a survival of the old territorial dynastic principle which the world has largely outgrown, has stamped its character and system upon the German people. "Prussia," says one of its apologists, "has put an iron girdle round the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... minded. But one day I chanced to 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 language ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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
... 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, ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... personalities whom the close of the episode had revealed. It was natural that the success of Sulla should be exploited by resentful members of the nobility as the triumph of the aristocrat over the parvenu, of the old diplomacy and the old bureaucracy over the coarse and childish methods of the opposition; it was tempting to circulate the view that the humiliation of Metellus had been avenged, that the man who had slandered and superseded him had found an immediate ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... called it into existence, it is because it was much more than an eating association, or an association for going to church on a certain day, or a burial club. It answered to a deeply inrooted want of human nature; and it embodied all the attributes which the State appropriated later on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than that. It was an association for mutual support in all circumstances and in all accidents of life, "by deed and advise," and it was an organization for maintaining justice—with this difference from the State, that on all these occasions a humane, a brotherly element ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... which sharpers cheated each other and the people. The leaders were bold only in sordid personal quarrels. The mass of the people were utterly untouched by the idea of nationality, in earnest about nothing but huckstering and petty gains. Over all was the grip of a foreign bureaucracy and a selfish Church tightening slowly, squeezing out the nation's life, grasping and holding fast its wealth. No man any longer made any demand except to be allowed to earn what would buy whisky enough to fuddle him into temporary forgetfulness of the present misery ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... retained by this rich province; he assured him its inhabitants were faithful and devoted, and ready to shed their blood for their king. He told his majesty, freely and honestly, that the old civil and military bureaucracy alone was to blame—that Silesia had not long an organized effective system of resistance—that this government had paralyzed the patriotic zeal of the citizens, instead of stimulating it—nay, that, by means of its insensate and ridiculous decrees, it had impeded in every way the development ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... intercourse, or intimacy, with the Governor, whose confidence, no less than the control of the treasury, it was their policy to monopolise. To the candidates for vice-regal favors, their smiles were fortune, and their frowns were fate. The Governor was a hostage in the keeping of the bureaucracy, and the people ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... think that by exchanging private ownership for a soulless bureaucracy you find salvation?" said Vane shortly. "You're rather optimistic, aren't you, on the subject of Government departments? . ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... memorial 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
... Liberal governments to entrust to their 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 ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... according to the latest improvements, is now substituted a bureaucracy of despotic commissions? Shame upon those who sneered at the very name of her to whom they owed the wealth they idolize! who cry down liberty because God has given it to them in such priceless abundance, boundless ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... characteristics. The object undertaken apparently in the interests of democracy can only be 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 have to be suppressed in the interests ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... only suggestion yet made had reference to buildings which, having been designed for office work, were obviously unsuitable. Another reason for keeping them on was their cost. Economy in one direction might lead to economy in another, and the whole fabric of the now bureaucracy would be threatened. It was therefore useless to hope for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... be happy till he gets it. But judging by some 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
... that of Scotland to the colonies of Britain, in the supply of mariners to the vessel of state. The population of Bohemia is a ninth part of that of the whole empire; but I dare say that a fourth of the bureaucracy of Austria is Bohemian. To account for this, we must take into consideration the great number of men of sharp intellect, good education, and scanty fortune, that annually ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... the Executive Government of India absolute powers to override the popular will, are still unrepealed. In spite of the tragic price paid in the Punjab for demonstrating the danger of unrestrained power in the hands of a foreign bureaucracy and the inhumanity of spirit by which tyranny in a panic will seek to save itself, we stand just where we were before, at the mercy of the Executive in respect of all ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... high-sounding phrases about liberty, rights of man, and the right of the people to govern. But they meant rights of man independent of God, and the right of the people to be absolute; and they continued the system of centralism, or government by bureaucracy, without God. The French have learned by sad experience that there is a thousand times more danger of change, turbulence, and disruption, under democratic absolutism than under autocratic absolutism. Louis Napoleon knows it well, and hence his significant phrase, 'The empire is peace.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... matter of business—you can put it into the treasury, and so ease your conscience. Remember, too," she went on more seriously, "how the enormous wealth of this same Tsar has swollen by the confiscation of fortunes whose possessors had committed no other crime than becoming obnoxious to the corrupt bureaucracy." ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... bridge substituted for some ugly old iron one,—there you have undoing and doing in one. Well, at the next ordinary meeting of the neighbours, or Mote, as we call it, according to the ancient tongue of the times before bureaucracy, a neighbour proposes the change, and of course, if everybody agrees, there is an end of discussion, except about details. Equally, if no one backs the proposer,—'seconds him,' it used to be called—the matter drops for the time being; ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... vain one in the light of all history. Militarism and the clans are by no means in the last ditch in Japan, and they will no more surrender their power than would the Russian bureaucracy. The only argument which is convincing in such a case is the last one which is ever used; and the mere mention of it by so-called socialists is sufficient to cause summary arrest in Japan. Sheltering themselves behind the Throne, and nominally deriving their latter-day dictatorship from the ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... The evil of bureaucracy can be removed only by our representative bodies becoming more effective voices of the social and moral will of the community, just as the evil of class control can only be effectually abolished by the rise and spread of the true democratic spirit, ever seeking that the agencies of the ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... time lost here in the labyrinths of Bureaucracy! And yet I heard that both the District Officer and the Police Inspector who are under the control of the Authority residing in Taiping, capital of Perak but who in reality enjoy almost complete liberty of action, find the time not only to discharge ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... 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 they are tumbling over themselves to prove how directly they touch daily life. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... and for more than half the time by men of Turkish race. Though now and again a strong man has gathered all the reins of control into his own hands and been for a time a personal monarch, as a rule the government has been, till recent years, a military bureaucracy. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... bureaucracy and commercial restraint under the old regime caused the planters to welcome the early news of reform projects in France and to demand representation in the coming States General. But the rapid progress ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... foreigners to laugh and sometimes to jeer at the universal sign of "Verboten" (Forbidden) seen all over Germany. They look upon it as the seal of an autocratic and bureaucratic government. It is nothing of the kind. The army, the bureaucracy, the autocratic Kaiser at the helm, and the landscape bestrewn with "Verboten" and "Nicht gestattet" (Not allowed), these are necessities in the case of these people. They do not know instinctively, or by training or experience, where to expectorate and where not to; where ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... England, as every one knows, 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 ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... three centuries later? A strongly centralized state in which an absolute ruler, worshiped like a god and surrounded by a large court, commanded a whole hierarchy of functionaries; cities divested of their local liberties and ruled by an omnipotent bureaucracy, the old capital herself the first to be dispossessed of her autonomy and subjected to prefects. Outside of the cities the monarch, whose private fortune was identical with the state finances, possessed immense domains managed by intendants and supporting a ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... 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. He has forced the telephone business into a postal ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... the monopoly of a small social class and appear to open careers to talent, but "it had been advocated for centuries as a sovereign remedy for political corruption," and as the one way to prevent the creation of a bureaucracy. [Footnote: Ford, op. cit., p. 169.] The practice of rapid change in public office was the application to a great territory of the image of democracy derived from ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... answer and retired confounded. The ultimatum dazed him, but he was forced to understand that beyond a certain limit, heroics, fooleries, and impertinences would not be tolerated by this terrible scavenger of European bureaucracy.[5] Lowe, in very truth, discerned the stern reality of the Emperor's piercing words, and he felt the need of greater caution bearing down on him. He pondered over these grave developments as he journeyed back ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... appropriately quoted, as they throw light on the present (1877-78) state of Germany, and explain in great measure the extraordinary relations between Church and State in the New German Empire: "The year 1848 proved to us Germans that we could not rely on our governments. Both diplomacy and bureaucracy are, and will remain, incorrigible. Our misery is, indeed, great. Dissension prevails among our good citizens; the ill-meaning are united. The Revolutionary War of 1848 and 1849 was a war of principles, but without results. It was repressed, but not exhausted. It keeps alive ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... of an oligarchy, and that such a despotism, however benevolent in its inception, ruthlessly sacrifices individual interests and liberty to the real or supposed good of the State; that even where constitutional forms remain the spirit which animated them has departed; that officialism and bureaucracy with their attendant evils become supreme, and that the national character steadily deteriorates. They warn us that we may pay too high a price even for organisation and efficiency; and, though it is natural that we should admire ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... anarchy of mediaeval times. In America, where every man is a czar, so far as the disposal of himself is concerned, the enslavement of the Russians seems a frightful disregard of the rights of man, the nation a giant Gulliver bound down to the earth by chains of creed and custom, of bureaucracy and perverted public opinion. Like Gulliver, it was bound when asleep, and it must continue fettered while its intellect remains torpid. Some day it will awake, stretch its mighty limbs, burst its feeble bonds, and hurl in disarray to the earth the whole host of liliputian officials and dignitaries ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 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
... elements in the two countries. The governing class in Russia, indeed, has not only been inspired by German ideas, it has been largely recruited from men of German stock; and it has manifested all the contempt and hatred which is characteristic of the German bureaucracy for the ideals of democracy, liberty, and free thought. The two Governments have always been ready to combine against popular insurrections, and in particular against every attempt of the Poles to recover their liberty. They have been ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy—the plain fruit of them all is that Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Party there are, of course, as always in a bureaucracy, different factions, though hitherto the external pressure has prevented disunion. It seemed to me that the personnel of the bureaucracy could be divided into three classes. There are first the old revolutionists, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... great object of the Revolution was to release LABOR from these restrictions." Undoubtedly these restrictive laws had their effect upon the temper of the people. Undoubtedly also there was much fear lest there should be established in the colonies a bureaucracy of major and minor officials, corruptly, as in England, winning fortunes for themselves. Yet the question of taxation, a matter of merely theoretical submission, which produced no hardship and would not impoverish the country, ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... state and that the sway of the Yamato was still far from receiving general recognition. A great Japanese scholar** has contended that the centralization which prevailed in later ages was wholly an imitation of Chinese bureaucracy, and that organized feudalism was the original form of government in Japan. The annals appear to support that view to a limited extent, but the subject will presently be ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... however, than cure definite phases of Canadian disaffection; his influence through Earl Grey told powerfully for a fuller and more optimistic conception of empire. With all its virtues, the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office did not understand the government of colonies such {223} as Canada; and where colonial secretaries had the ability and will, they had not knowledge sufficient to lead them into paths at once democratic and imperial. Even Grey relapsed on occasion from the optimism ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... opposite the castle. In imitation of Martin 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 in many of its manifestations, created singular ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... permit a peaceful revolution at the will of the majority. They have as well cleared from the way of majority rule every obstacle,—privilege of ruler, fetter of ancient law, power of legislator. They have simplified the structure of government, held their officials as servants, rendered bureaucracy impossible, converted their representatives to simple committeemen, and shown the parliamentary system not essential to lawmaking. They have written their laws in language so plain that a layman may ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... with taxation, was on the verge of civil war. Russia, whose masses were overridden roughshod by a bureaucracy weighting down the peasants with onerous national burdens, expected sooner or later the cataclysmic upheaval with which the Nihilistic societies have long been threatening its tyrannical Government. France, seriously financially embarrassed because of crop impoverishment and bad foreign ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... belong. Other causes combined to concentrate official vigilance upon it; there had been a scare about spies carrying explosives in small objects, and one of those experimental orders which pass like waves over bureaucracy had decreed first that all visitors should change their clothes for a sort of official sackcloth, and then (when this method caused some murmurs) that they should at least turn out their pockets. ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... gas), insufficient power supplies, and slow implementation of economic reforms. Economic reform is stalled in many instances by political infighting and corruption at all levels of government. Progress also has been blocked by opposition from the bureaucracy, public sector unions, and other vested interest groups. The newly-elected BNP government, led by Prime Minister Khaleda ZIA, has the parliamentary strength to push through needed reforms, but the party's level of political will to do ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... tenure, would be 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
... self, and that only so could we hope to help others. We learned to discard prepossessions, and try to see things as they really are. We learned that the Liberty which we worshipped must be conditioned by Authority—an authority not wielded by rank or bureaucracy, but by the State acting as a whole through its accredited representatives, and depending for its existence on the co-operation of the entire nation. In self-government so founded, however stringently it might exercise its power, there was no degradation for the governed, because, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... Such, at the present day (1885), is the situation of a professor at Oxford, Goettingen, and Harvard Such, under the Ancient Regime, were a bishop, a member of the French Parliaments, and even a plain attorney. What can be worse than universal bureaucracy, producing a mechanical and servile uniformity! Those who serve the public need not all be Government clerks; in countries where an aristocracy has perished, bodies of this kind are their ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... soldiers and carbineers, the 150 unpaid diplomatic representatives of Monaco abroad, the Vicar-General, the Treasurer-General, the Honorary Almoner, and all the other "appliances and excrescences of civilized government," which went to make up that "perfection of bureaucracy and red tape in a territory one mile broad and five miles long," were all statistically accurate. Throughout the whole a reference to other monarchies and other swarms of functionaries ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... upon the policy of the government. Long before this time the custom of abdication, and the habits of luxury and effeminacy in which the family of the shogun was reared, had dragged the house down to the usual impotent level. The government was conducted by a system of bureaucracy which relieved the titular shoguns from all responsibility and allowed them to live in profitless voluptuousness. So that one died and another reigned in his stead without causing more than a ripple upon the surface of ...
— Japan • David Murray
... of Frederick the Great, in 1786, to the death of William the First, in 1888, includes, in a convenient period to remember: the downfall of Frederick's patriotic edifice; the apathy and impotency that followed upon the breaking up of the bureaucracy he had welded into efficiency; the shuffling of the German states by Napoleon as though they were the pack of cards in a great political game; a revival of patriotism in Prussia after floggings and insults that were past bearing; the jealousies and enmities of the various ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... almost as 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 ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... 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 to all men of ranks; his intellect and self-complacency ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton |
