Thomas Jefferson Quotes
We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.
Jefferson is the hero of the “small government” enthusiasts of modern times. In his day it was the conservative Federalists who wanted a larger government while the Jeffersonians, the radicals of the day argued for smaller government. Jefferson not only favored smaller government, but he actually cut the size of the Federal workforce something which in modern times no president has done except for William Clinton.
Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826, 3rd President of the United States (Democratic Republican, VA), First State of Nation Address, December 8, 1801
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This seems to hold in the private and the public sectors both.
The President wanted the White House slimmed as an example and reduced the First Lady’s staff markedly. Roslyn Carters response was, “But I’m not everybody!” She didn’t get her staff increase.
He had been appointed by President Nixon to head a "blue ribbon panel to review the Department of Defense and was announcing the conclusions.
First woman to receive the British Order of Merit. For a man to so criticize the War Office would have been very “cheeky” at the time, but for a woman to do so was unheard of. Her characterization of bureaucracy, in a cabinet level department is as good a description of bureaucracy as any since. See {614056} for her castigation of the chief bureaucrat.
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.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He had previously served as the second vice president of the United States under John Adams between 1797 and 1801. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national levels.
