Systemic Dysfunction Quotes

I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.

Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms - the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.

Beyond politics, the West is suffering from what can be called a crisis of brokenness - broken institutions, broken families and broken souls.

The United Nations is a mess, riddled with scandals. In fact, the U.N. itself is a scandal.

Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs.

In government, the scum rises to the top.

When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.

Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?

[In America] there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them.

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.

While Admiral Neffenger is an impressive man, it is naive and dangerous to pretend installing one director can heal what ails TSA, the Department of Homeland Security needs to admit that it has a crisis of bureaucratic complacency - lacking an overarching vision and coherent measures of success and failure.

Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagances are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and superstructure of the government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks and ever will.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

A party is perpetually corrupted by personality.

For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough. For example, the human body is a system of systems. If just one system, such as the cardiovascular system, shuts down, death follows.

The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization