Richard Holbrooke Quotes
I want you to learn nothing from government. This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this.
Richard Holbrooke, 1941-2010, U. S. Delegate to the United Nations, Assistant Secretary of State and Special Envoy (Democrat), Ambassador to Germany, Statement to Vali Nasr, a new State Department Key Staffer he hired, Quoted in “The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan”, Foreign Policy, March / April 2013
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Gates was then a mid-level functionary at the CIA. His ability to tell the truth to powerful people got him promoted and he eventually became director himself as well as the Secretary of Defense. The Department of Agriculture at the time was generally known as a very bureaucratic organization.
The conservative newspaper was describing a leading Congressional conservative, Tom Delay. Delay had been cited three times by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee. He was also accused of many other unethical activities and he was under criminal investigation in his home State of Texas for violation of the campaign finance laws. The Beltway refers to the Beltway highway around Washington DC within the bounds of which most politicians and lobbyists work and live.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
He confuses modernity and religion. Muslims who live in a modern world have the same degree of bureaucracy then the Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and other religions do. The Muslims of America have the same degree of paperwork as other Americans, and the Turkish bureaucracy has as much filing and other paperwork as countries where the majority of people are of different religions. Historically, when England and France and other Christian countries were in the Dark Ages, Islamic bureaucrats kept Western and Eastern knowledge alive, and when the Ottoman Empire ruled most of the known world, they almost collapsed under their very heavy bureaucracy.
The intellectually clever person will have many who will follow him and leverage his ideas. This is one of the reasons that intellectuals are sought as leaders and advisors, but also distrusted by power structures just because the can find followers.
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was an American diplomat and author. He was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world (Asia from 1977 to 1981 and Europe from 1994 to 1996).
