"Bureaucracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a 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 confirm the saying of the wicked that men of letters had much better have ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... won't 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 ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... see much difference. We're both trying to overthrow a vicious bureaucracy." He laughed again. "You hate them as ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... parties in the State and the two 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tempting to circulate the view that the humiliation of Metellus had been avenged, that the man who had slandered and superseded him had found an immediate nemesis in a youthful member of the aristocracy.[1199] Such a version, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... could not see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that all of mankind were such beast fools that, after this one great sin, they could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had monarchy nor bureaucracy, bourgeois peace ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... home 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 ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... 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 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
... several national organizations. Austria-Hungary has been forced to assume a secondary position in Europe, because the want of national cohesion and vitality deprived her political advance of all momentum. Russia has suddenly discovered that a corrupt bureaucracy is incapable of a national organization as efficient as modern military and political competition requires. It was desirable in the interest of the Austrians, the Hungarians, and the Russians, that these weaknesses should be exposed; and ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... his superiors in a low and 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 cage ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... ran for President on the simple platform of 'give the country back to the people'. His ideas and views so fired the minds and hopes of the citizens of America, regimented and ground down by the cancerous growth of bureaucracy, that even most of the bureaucrats and reliefers joined to elect him by one of the ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... 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 better, with due science and method? Britain had shown no scruple in appropriating ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... natural sea salt in large quantities and of course, organically grown fruits, vegetables grains and nuts. And what is "Organic?" The word means food raised in compliance with a set of rules contrived by a certification bureaucracy. When carefully analyzed, the somewhat illogical rules are not all that different in spirit than the rules of kashsruth or kosher. And the Organic certification bureaucrats aren't all that different than the rabbis who certify food as being ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... of S. Mark, upon her strongest 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 a survey ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... M. Bonaparte was desirous that Arago should take the oath. Understand,—astronomy must swear fealty. In a well-regulated state, like France or China, everything is bureaucracy, even science. The mandarin of the Institute depends upon the mandarin of the police. The great parallactic telescope owes homage to M. Bonaparte. An astronomer is a sort of constable of the heavens. The observatory is like any sentry-box. It ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... it to the shrine to which it was supposed to 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. Colonel Morris, the officer in charge, was ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 in the eyes ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... 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 to supply funds for the support of the schools and then ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... classes surrendered their powers to the monarch, the third estate was coming into its own. Not until the war of independence, however, was it able to withstand the combination of bureaucracy and plutocracy that made common cause with the central government against the local rights of the cities and the customary privileges of the gilds. Almost everywhere the prince was able, with the tacit support of the wealthier burghers, to substitute ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... 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 to Mr. Berkeley's classification, may be reduced to 42, of which 26 are directly under ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... 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 songs of such a nature that after due ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... 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; a ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... 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 ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... sneering official has not escaped shrewd knocks from the wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Ahmes succeeded in founding the Eighteenth dynasty, these landowners had disappeared. All the landed estate of the country had passed into the possession of the Pharaoh and the priests, and the old feudal aristocracy had been replaced by a bureaucracy, the members of which owed their power and position to the king. The history of Joseph accounts for this, and it is the only explanation of the fact which is at present forthcoming. Famine compelled the people to sell their lands to the king and his minister, and a Hyksos Pharaoh and ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... office, a little building independent of the main house, where he passed his days fumbling among boxes and pigeonholes and great books with green backs, with the rage for bureaucracy due to his early ignorance and the strong impression made upon him long before by the office of ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... 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. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Heaven and Hell, compromise with the State, Plutocracy, Nationalism, Imperialism, Conquest, War, Diplomacy, Secular Philosophy, Secular Science, Agnostic Parliaments, Tribal Chauvinism, Education, Officialism, Bureaucracy, etc., etc. All these things have their own spirit, and every such spirit is partly or wholly included in the spirit of the Church, i.e. of modern Christianity. None of the Christian Churches of our time makes an exception as to this inclusiveness ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... the several communities have full opportunity of asserting themselves, and in which each local authority shall have power to decide on those measures which are essential to the development of the resources of its own district, without interference from a centralized bureaucracy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... 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 to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 of the mob, and by a monarchical theory that set up ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... But Rome, Genoa, Parma, 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 autocratic ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... 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 of atrocity, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... that, while it was not generally known or even suspected, Japan was actually "bled 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
... fleet, at the battle of Tsushima, which finally decided the fate of Japan, but thousands of little factors, small and remote, determined that success. Causes not less numerous engendered the defeat of the Russians—a bureaucracy as complicated as ours, and as irresponsible; lamentable material, although paid for by its weight in gold; a system of graft at every degree of the social hierarchy, and general indifference to the interests of ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... 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 so ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... marauders; and for yet another two centuries her soil was in dispute between the Eastern Empire and the Teutons. The strategic importance of the peninsula, the magic of the name of Rome, the more recent tradition that Ravenna was the natural headquarters of imperial bureaucracy in the West, were three cogent reasons why the statesmen of Constantinople should insist that Italy must be recovered whatever outlying provinces of the West were abandoned. For sixty years after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus (476) Italy was ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... politics, the pros and cons of both sides. All of us are continually assimilating what we hear and see. Among other things, I note that on the newsstands there are no publications from western lands. Why? Because still, after fifty years, our Communist bureaucracy dare not allow its people to read what they will. I note, too, that the shops on 25th October Avenue are not all directed toward the Russian man on the street, unless he is paid unbelievably more than we have heard. Sable coats? ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... not pretend to be clearer-sighted than my neighbours; but in the mist each of us sees the form of some evil which he specially dislikes; and to my thinking Bureaucracy is just as grave a menace to Freedom as Militarism, and in some ways graver, as being more plausible. We used to call ourselves Collectivists, and we rejoiced in the prospect of the State doing for us what we ought to do for ourselves. We voted Political Economy a dismal science (which it is), and ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... time spoken of, there was an open secret to every well informed Greek that the Queen of Greece, Olga, had been the tool of the Russian bureaucracy, trying by means of religious influences to keep the Greeks under the Russian political control; that the Queen Olga paid the expenses for the education of a monk, who, on his return from Russia, where he was graduated from the theological ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... foreign trade. Unemployment is low and capacity constraints are limiting growth potential. Denmark is a net exporter of food and energy and enjoys a comfortable balance of payments surplus. Government objectives include streamlining the bureaucracy and further privatization of state assets. The government has been successful in meeting, and even exceeding, the economic convergence criteria for participating in the third phase (a common European currency) of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), but so ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... who was to preside as chairman, was to have the right to exercise the privilege of a casting vote. From a democratic point of view such a body would be an assembly pour rire, and would only serve to entrench the present bureaucracy more securely by the semblance of representation which it would offer, while retaining the power of the purse in the hands of a body carefully constituted in such a way that the small minority who ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... ought, will evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and perhaps to ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... 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 ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... redoubled during the war, the President, in his first term of office, was stormed by 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 ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... 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
... the Teuton from talking politics. But he can theorize concerning the State. The State is an active philosophic concept that holds off the people from discussing and gossiping about Wilhelm. It does not exist apart from the ruling family and apart from the bureaucracy which is the ruling family in action. It takes on their character. The State is a mirage which the citizen is made to gawk at in the air, thinking he sees something besides the frowning German sky. It surrounds the Emperor with the divine halo, removes ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... 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 ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... 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 drawn and held together by a common interest in tyranny, ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... They 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 ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... 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 over, and that the people, ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... details, or direct them with order and precision. But in this country, mark, oh! red-tapeists, everything relating to interior administration is reduced to the greatest simplicity, and from this simplicity, freed from the complicated system of European red-tapeism and bureaucracy, results, it is to be hoped, a strict economy in public expenses, and a rapid process in the courts of justice and other Government affairs. Where a European prince would require a hundred different employes, here five or six clerks suffice. Besides ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... probably have to go to India at once. Simultaneously it daily modified George's accepted plans for the structure, exactly as though it was a professional architect and George an amateur, and it involved him in a seemly but intense altercation between itself and the subordinate bureaucracy of a Presidency. It kept George employed. In due course people discovered that business must proceed as usual, and even the architectural profession, despite its traditional pessimism, had hopes of municipalities and other bodies which were to inaugurate ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... of the master abuses of the old system. The introduction of the Corvee, in the sense in which we have to speak of it, dates no further back than the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was an encroachment and an innovation on the part of the bureaucracy, and the odd circumstance has been remarked that the first mention of the road corvees in any royal Act is the famous edict of 1776, which suppressed them. Until the Regency this famous word had described only ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... other hand, the political power, the State power. "Force also dominates property" means that property has not yet got the political power in its hands, but is rather vexed by it, for example, by arbitrary taxes, by confiscation, by privileges, by the disturbing interference of the bureaucracy in industry and trade and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... of the various departements, the bureaucracy of provinces and cities, are not only amazed ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... you will see if that is ever taken in any but homoeopathic doses! Why, you will have against you the bureaux, those sacrosanct bureaux that have governed this country since bureaucracy has existed, and they will cram more than one Warcolier down your throat, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... 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 variety of his duties enlarges and fashions the mind of ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... and left his children; known as entertaining subversive opinions on social questions (by The Red Room, The New Realm and other works Strindberg became the great standard-bearer of the Swedish Radicals in their campaign against conventionalism and bureaucracy); that he gives the impression of not being in full possession of his senses; that he is sought by his children's guardian because of unpaid maintenance allowance—everything corresponds to the experiences of the unfortunate Strindberg himself, with ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... Communist 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, tested by years of persecution. These men have most of the highest posts. Prison ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... 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 outside, rather than inside, parliament; while administration by a vast army of experts would ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... 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 ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... 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
... of her childhood Emma Goldman passed in a small, idyllic place in the German-Russian province of Kurland, where her father had charge of the government stage. At the time Kurland was thoroughly German; even the Russian bureaucracy of that Baltic province was recruited mostly from German JUNKERS. German fairy tales and stories, rich in the miraculous deeds of the heroic knights of Kurland, wove their spell over the youthful mind. But the beautiful idyl was of short duration. Soon ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... 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 ...
— Subversive • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... he had carefully investigated conditions, knew where the trouble lay, and felt sure that the mass of people would welcome a change from the unbearable existing conditions. The country was then, and had been for centuries, wrongfully governed by a bureaucracy, and he declared his belief that the Mexican people as a whole believed that the Americans would give them a greater measure of freedom and protection than they ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... without a rifle among them, and troops were put into trenches relying for weapons on those which fell from the hands of their dead or wounded comrades. These were the organized atrocities of autocratic bureaucracy, and it was little wonder that in time they bred in the breasts of Russian soldiers a fiercer resentment against their rulers who betrayed them than against the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... 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 ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... 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, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... "Listen, you! I'm not going to be pushed around by you or anyone else! I know better than you do what Alcatraz is like, and I'm not going back there if I can help it. This country is still Constitutionally a democracy, not a bureaucracy, and I'm going to see to it that I get to ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 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 under the ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... 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 again to his Majesty's ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Obstruction.... It appears that Crown and Parliament are alike to be disestablished, and that in their stead we are to put the Obstructive and the Bore.... I should like to ask them what kind of Government they think best, a Bureaucracy or a Bore-ocracy?"—Mr. Balfour ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... prepared the way, by their intellectual labours, for the abolition of the Shogunate. They were Shinto scholars; and they represented the not unnatural reaction of native conservatism against the [309] long tyranny of alien ideas and alien beliefs,—against the literature and philosophy and bureaucracy of China,—against the preponderant influence upon education of the foreign religion of Buddhism. To all this they opposed the old native literature of Japan, the ancient poetry, the ancient cult, the early traditions and rites of Shinto. The names of these three remarkable men ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... a unified, 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 industrial state under socialism might conceivably take: The official directors of industry might be either an autocratic bureaucracy, or they might else be subject to elected politicians representing the knowledge and opinions prevalent ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... too, Leopold succeeded in strengthening the authority of the central government. The old estates, indeed, survived; but the emperor kept the effective power in his own hands, and to his reign are traceable the first beginnings of that system of centralized bureaucracy which was established under Maria Theresa and survived, for better or for worse, till the revolution of 1848. It was under Leopold, also, that the Austrian standing army was established in spite of much opposition; the regiments ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of poverty we must be careful to avoid the mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into when liberating ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... 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 ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... had not been asked to dance, and they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation. There was, of course, the opportunity of talking and of listening to the band which discoursed in a corner behind palms, but the distraction which is the social Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the air, visibly increasing in the neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and made the commonplaces people uttered to each other disjointed and fragmentary, while it was plain that few were aware whether music was being rendered or not. Anyone sensitive ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... on the bureaucracy is well known. From the forty and one suppressed departments a crowd of honorable employees returned to Paris with nothing to do, and clamorous for places inferior to those they had lately occupied. ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... Ireland still retained a separate administration, that administration was not under the control of any self-governing authority. Out of the Dragon's teeth of the Union rose the sinister army of a new bureaucracy, recruited almost entirely by the enemies of Ireland, and for the most part even working with its guns trained against the hopes and aspirations ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... House 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 to all men of ranks; his intellect and self-complacency ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... up, as helpless in the face of great emergencies, as incapable of choosing good leaders; Lecky has demonstrated the danger of the corruption of the democracy by evil politicians; Belloc has shown how it tends to develop, and then become a slave to, a bureaucracy; Graham Wallas has portrayed the psychological peril of its hypnotization by colours and claptrap. All the dangers thus enumerated are real and formidable. They have, however, to be faced and overcome by men of goodwill: for there is now no alternative to democracy but anarchy. Fortunately ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... have led criminologists to the conclusion that the ancient penalty of enforced labour was more logical, useful, and advantageous both for the culprit and the community than all modern punishments. The Mormons of America and the religious sects persecuted in Russia by an omnipotent bureaucracy, have by their energy transformed uninhabitable regions into lands of extraordinary fertility. Still greater results might be obtained, if the abnormal tendencies of certain individuals were turned into useful channels, instead of being pent up until they manifest themselves in anti-social acts, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... economy could be federated as it was established and stabilized, with special attention to the need for a maximum of local self help to balance against pressures toward bureaucracy and the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... Whichever was the source of the failure (most people will now blame both), the fault must be laid at the door of the Irish Executive; not of Mr. Forster himself, but of those on whom he relied. It had been a Dublin Castle Bill, conceived and carried out by the incompetent bureaucracy which has so long pretended to govern Ireland. Such a proof of incompetence destroyed whatever confidence in that bureaucracy then remained to us, and the disclosures which the Phoenix Park murders and the subsequent proceedings against the Invincibles brought ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... 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 ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... revolution in England and France. 4. He pointed out that "All power to the Soviets" now means "All power to the Bolsheviks," and said that he wished that the Soviets should actually have all power instead of merely supporting the Bolshevik bureaucracy. He was asked for his own programme, but said he had not time to give it. I watched the applause carefully. General dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs was obvious, but it was also obvious that no party would have a chance that admitted ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... food administration is intended, of course, only to meet a manifest emergency and to continue only while the war lasts. Since it will be composed for the most part of volunteers, there need be no fear of the possibility of a permanent bureaucracy arising out ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... 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 any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... be able to redeem 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 Europe, with that access ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... all centre around the Capitol, or in the legal circle that clusters around the Supreme Court, on in the Bureaucracy, where vigor of brains atones for a lack of polish, or among the diplomats, worshiped by the young women and envied by the young men. Vulgar people who amass fortunes by successful gambling in stocks, pork, or grain can ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... encroachments of wealth, in the multiplication of 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 distrust ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... first instance, under such a system, each local unit is responsible for its own activities and for its own discipline. It is obvious that no matter how efficient the bureaucracy, it would hardly be possible for a centralized authority to control, from one point, the six millions of farms and the quarter million industrial establishments of the United States. It is only where the handling of local matters rests with those immediately concerned ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... "Until an inept bureaucracy was substituted for the old paternal rule, and the revenue quadrupled by increased taxation, the Filipinos were as happy a community as could be found in any colony. The population greatly multiplied; they lived in competence, if not in affluence; cultivation was ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... 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 of half a century we are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... in Taras Boulba. In the Portrait and Memoirs of a Madman, Gogol shows a weird power, which may be compared with that of the fantastic American, Edgar Allan Poe. Besides his novels, he wrote a brilliant comedy called the Revisor, dealing with the evils of bureaucracy. ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... saw the error of Consalvi, but mistook the remedy; and his government was the most unpopular that had been seen for a century. Where the laity are excluded from the higher offices, and the clergy enjoy the monopoly of them, that moral power which modern bureaucracy derives from the corporate spirit, and the feelings of honour which it inspires, cannot subsist. One class becomes demoralised by its privileged position, the other by its limited prospects and insufficient pay. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some of the most prominent Russian exiles—such as Kropotkin—take the view that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the irresponsible officers of 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 ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi |
