Tan Cheng Bock Quotes

Presidents may go to the seashore or to the mountains. Cabinet officers may go about the country explaining how fortunate the country is in having such an administration, but the machinery at Washington continues to operate under the army of faithful non-commissioned officers, and the great mass of governmental business is uninterrupted.

The government is a machinery manned by human beings.

State government is filled with dedicated, diligent professionals.

Some civil servants are neither servants nor civil.

The civil service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law.

Government workers often get a bad rap, but it's rare for them to receive much appreciation when government works.

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

Being a cabinet minister is not like running a company. A country is not a company.

The city’s [civil service] workforce must be considered part of the solution, not the problem.

Democracy requires a strong civil service—government employees who are sufficiently protected from random political influences to carry out the law in a disinterested fashion.

Those of you who end up in public service will come to appreciate the difficulty of wielding the extraordinary power of the government effectively and fairly. Much of this power is housed in the many departments and agencies that are charged with carrying out specific functions of government. Those who do not have daily interactions with a government agency may not realize just how much influence bureaucracies wield.

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.

When I first became a civil servant, I had to fill out a form. The form did not ask whether or not I was a citizen of America but I had to certify that I was a Democrat.

Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.

Our biggest problem is that we have built a permanent structure of government - federal, state and local - the permanent employees. [W]e’ve come to a place where they actually determine policy in this country more than does the congress of the United States.

What is the government? Nothing, unless supported by opinion.

I am an old public functionary.

As we seek to improve the management of the federal government, we should keep in mind that the government is not a private corporation. What may make sense for a large corporation may not always make sense for the federal government. In our quest for efficiency, we must not lose sight of the reasons why we enacted certain federal programs in the first place.

It has been my philosophy all my life that good government is good politics.

What is politics but business?

Governments are not like a business. They don’t look like a business, work like a business, think like a business, and they don’t have a bottom line.

I long for the time when the public service will get onto a higher plane than that of serving political parties, and come to serve the public interest instead.

The responsibility of a public official is to make the country work!

It seems appropriate to call attention at this time to the fine spirit shown during the past year by our public servants. I cannot praise too highly the cheerful work of the civil-service employees, and of those temporarily working for the Government.

I found the clerks mainly earnest, mainly honest, anxious to do the right thing — very hard working, very attentive. I do not refer to swell officials — the men who wear the decorations, get the fat salaries. I refer to the average clerks, the obscure crowd, who after all run the government: they are on the square.