Richard Crossman Quotes

The British civil service ... is a beautifully designed and effective braking mechanism.

The present King and Queen are popular, very, and increasingly so, but they have no message for the Labour Party who believe them, and rightly I fear, to be but the puppets of a Palace clique…. Still, it is the aristocracy which still rules England although nobody seems to believe it.

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.

I'm a statistic in a system that a civil servant dominates.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

Party domination and State leadership are concepts incompatible with one another.

We had thought you had been ruler over your land ... but now we perceive that there be other men that do rule, and not men but peasants and merchants ... and you flow in your maidenly estate like a maid.

By its nature, government is not subject to the profit-and-loss test, to the domination by the consumers, of the free market …. it need serve no one except itself. The only limit on government is the enormously wide one of people rising up to refuse to obey its orders (including taxes); short of such revolution, however, there is little to limit government or to check the entrenchment or burgeoning of its elite.

The Civil Service rewards those who do no more than sit at their desks and say no.

This is why I hate governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by the fine print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts.

The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.

Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.

Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging.

When we think we lead, we are most led.

There are limits to all things. I do not choose to be dictated to as to who I may or may not receive in my own house.... I shall use my own discretion.... You will, of course, use yours as to the composition of your Government.

The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

To safeguard the people's money what we call red tape is tied around all government activity until the really efficient honest public servant has a somewhat difficult time, but we are still laboring under the theory that the majority of the world is dishonest.

Making the bureaucracy accountable to the President in any comprehensive and enduring way is impossible. Making it alert to his preferences is possible in those cases where Presidents put loyal and competent subordinates in charge of making decisions.

The good government of one man is the bad government of another

It is no secret that Washington, D.C., is a tempest of people and institutions relentlessly seeking power over the lives of everyday Americans.

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

I didn't have any idea what politics was like. I was surprised at how difficult it is to get something done. In the private world, if I have an idea, I just do it.