Karl Marx Quotes

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.

So begins a question which has of late become more and more urgent: what is the relation of aesthetics to politics?

A lot of companies have teams, but they are not really independent. They still have to get stuff approved by the boss. You have to change how and where decisions are made. If the hierarchy makes the decision, it will be based on politics.

I'm interested in institutions, particularly in the way institutions close ranks. They have hierarchies and their own ethics.

Studies do show that in hierarchical structures, you do get more harassment. There's more power concentrated at the top, which means there's more abuse of power concentrated at the top. And every TV show is very much a hierarchy.

Everybody has a corporate structure.

The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.

The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one

Once you have hierarchy you need rules to protect and administer it, and then you need law and the enforcement of the rules, and you end up with some kind of chain of command or system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it. Hierarchy imposes laws and rules and you end up missing the wonder of relationship that we intended for you.

Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.

Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.

The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.

I look in a right of property - on the right of individuals, to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyments, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves, as essential to the welfare and even to the continued existence of society.

We on the left have forgotten that the question is not how do you get good people to rule, most people who rule are mediocre at best and usually venal. The question is how do we make those in power frightened of us and not be seduced by formal political processes.

Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

If it is correct to say that there will always be rightist temperaments and leftist temperaments, it is nevertheless also correct to say that political philosophy is neither rightist nor leftist; it must simply be true .

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

The truth is we have a political system and an economic system controlled by a few extremely wealthy people. Not Barack Obama, not Bernie Sanders, no one person has the influence by himself or herself to take on this enormous array of power unless millions of people begin to work together to demand changes.

Not ever having been an agent myself, my sense is that upper-level agents who have the most power, who can move people through the system more easily, are less willing to take on the volume of work to break somebody new. And then lower-level people, if they are willing to take on somebody new, they don't necessarily have as much sway, and it's harder for them to push somebody through.

The crucial fact to realize about all the powerful machinery of the Corporate State - its laws, structure, political system - is that it possesses no mind.

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.