Institutional Dynamics Quotes

Congress is a collection of committees that come together in a Chamber periodically to approve one another's actions.

Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.

One thing I have learned in institutions is not to press hard on the fact that their inmates are, like the rest of mankind, sinners; for they, like many others, are liable to confuse the generic term "sinner" with the specific term "criminal." Most of us are so accustomed to admit that we have fallen short of grace and are "miserable offenders," in view of our possibilities and opportunities, that we do not resent being called "sinners"; but not so with our congregation.

It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent.

People rise and fall on the basis of the makings of institutions.

In business terms, if you take over a company and oust its CEO or fire a divisional chief, you run the place. But in institutional terms, as it happens, it doesn't at all work that way.

The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.

Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It's more difficult to be a friend - even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it's more of a challenge for them. It's just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility.

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?