John Steinbeck Quotes

Sometimes it's hard to tell which evokes more anger – businesses that know and care about nothing except profits or governments that know and care about nothing except power and paper-pushing. However, anger is not a solution. Anger attempts to shout down problems, and it never works.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money,--the “spoils,” so called, “of office.” And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

I have a lot less faith in the system. You really don't understand how swampy it is until you get here.

But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.

It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us, 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

Might was the measure of right.

The wrong people will do everything in their power to guarantee that the wrong political climate will continue. It seems, then, that the wrong people ensure the wrong political climate and the wrong political climate ensures the wrong people. How then to break free of this vicious circle?

Institutions are imperfect. Governments surely are. People are.

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines.

The walls are raised against honest men in civic life.

The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.

The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

How soon the labor of men would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object -- the happiness of man -- to the selfish interest of kings, nobles, and priests.