Civil Servants And Politicians Quotes

When politicians and civil servants hear the word culture they feel for their blue pencils.

When a civil servant or politician acts out of self-interest, it's called corruption, but when a citizen does it, it's called public interest.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. ... in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.

Isn’t there a risk, you wonder, of indigenous leaders being corrupted by the big corporations? No doubt. But aren’t we already living with the problem of government officials, politicians, civil servants, political parties and mayors being corrupted by these companies or – to put it in gentler terms – agreeing to act in a compliant manner? They

Machiavelli was in constant trouble for failing to keep the politicians properly informed of what he was up to. 16 One cannot help but feel his behavior suggests a professional civil servant's contempt for the amateurs from whom he was obliged to take his instructions, an attitude that could easily have led him to long for more authoritarian government.

the White House converted the position of CDC director from career civil servant to presidential appointee. Since the agency’s inception back in 1946, no one had paid much attention to the party politics of the CDC director. (“No one ever asked me,” said Foege.) Henceforth the CDC director would not bubble up from inside the CDC, lifted by the approval of his peers, but would be plucked from the supporters of whichever politician happened to occupy the White House.

The judgment, handed down by Judge Ian Chin of the Sarawak High Court, demonstrated astonishing independence from the Malaysian government. Chin knew the price of that independence. After a much-maligned judgment against a politician belonging to the ruling Barisan National government in 1998, he had been verbally threatened by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, and then enrolled in a five-day boot camp with other judges for “re-educational” purposes. While there, the primacy of the government’s interests was hammered into the judicial civil servants.3 Crushing the independence of the courts was done systematically under Mahathir. In 1988, the autocratic Premier had arbitrarily dismissed the country’s top judge, Lord President Salleh Abas, thereby keeping the remaining judges on a short lead.4 Even today, in 2014, Malaysia’s judges still have difficulty ruling independently when government interests are at stake.

The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality. The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

Why don’t I just stop training juniors? I said to myself as I angrily turned the pedals. Why don’t I just do all the operating myself? Why should I have to carry the burden of deciding whether they can operate or not when the fucking management and politicians dictate their training? I’ve got to see the patients every day on the ward anyway as the juniors are so inexperienced now – on the few occasions when they’re actually in the hospital, that is. Yes, I shall no longer train anybody, I thought with a sudden sense of relief. It’s not safe. There are so many consultants now that having to come in occasionally at night wouldn’t be a great hardship . . . The country’s massively in debt financially, why not have a massive debt of medical experience as well? Let’s have a whole new generation of ignorant doctors in the future. Fuck the future, let it look after itself, it’s not my responsibility. Fuck the management, and fuck the government and fuck the pathetic politicians and their fiddled expenses and fuck the fucking civil servants in the fucking Department of Health. Fuck everybody.

In this scenario, ten years from now, if the tech giants are not restrained and their power as data-monopolies becomes further entrenched, governments will find themselves increasingly sidelined and impotent. Reduced to mere gatekeepers, politicians and civil servants will likely retreat behind algorithmic government, with laws shaped by data and machine learning, with all its inherent biases and imperfections, and public services gradually surrendered to private businesses. Indeed, we should expect just about every area of human existence, currently managed by government, to be dominated by Big Tech and its outriders: from the future of finance (just about everyone), to healthcare (Google), and from low-cost housing (Apple, Google) to education (Google, again) and autonomous vehicles (Tesla, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, etc.).

Till we successfully build a meritocratic society, the integrity of a democracy remains predicated on the integrity of the civil servants. Civil servants are the first defenders of democracy, against crooked politicians as well as angry, mindless mobs.

Soon my body will perish but my work will continue to create doctors with character and accountability - teachers with character and accountability - politicians with character and accountability - civil servants with character and accountability - scientists with character and accountability - preachers with character and accountability - janitors, bus conductors, waitresses and construction workers with character and accountability - in short, my body will perish but my work will continue to create human beings of character and accountability.

But the contradiction remains and the cycle repeats itself: the capital investment needed to raise productivity through innovation means constant capital grows relative to variable capital and also, therefore, the surplus value produced by variable capital. Surplus value is converted into capital faster than it is produced and so capital once again over-accumulates. And because the overall mass of capital is now even greater than before, an even greater magnitude of surplus value is required alongside an even greater devaluation of capital in order to reproduce and expand it yet further. Crisis is therefore inherent to the system, as increasing magnitudes of capital become dormant while waiting for profitable conditions to return, and cannot be put down merely to ‘greed’, hoarding or the ‘bad’ or ‘erroneous choices’ of capitalists, politicians, economists and civil servants. Private and public debt rises not because of arbitrary overspending but in order to make up for the insufficient production of surplus value.

It is easier to blame the politicians and civil servants than to take responsibility for the issues of one's own society. Society is us, so its issues are our responsibility.

It is easier to blame the politicians and civil servants than to take responsibility for the issues of one's own society. Society is us, so its issues are our responsibility - they are the responsibility of each one of us, from the scientist to the civil servant, from the janitor to the teacher, from the preacher to the sex-worker.

Jargon is the replacement for the naturally metaphorical vernacular of the people. If their speech reflects their thinking, then there are many professionals and politicians, trade union leaders and civil servants who know not what they do. They are not merely neglecting a glorious heritage of wonderful language; they are obscuring the paths of truth.

Despite habitual protests by civil servants and politicians that no such process is under way, the tortured and slow death of Internet privacy in the West, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, is a sad – albeit visible – reality and is probably inevitable.

Neither politicians nor civil servants at the conference had experience in managing economic affairs beyond their own borders. The pre-war international trade system had been developed by private capitalists. State intervention had been limited to adjusting trade barriers, protesting at breached contracts, giving diplomatic support to concession-hunters. There was no governmental expertise in international interventions when businesses or economies were failing. It is therefore not surprising that the victorious nations thought only in terms of seizing booty or of placating voters.

The people around him, his family, his friends, aroused a feeling of shame and rage within him. He had seen them on the road, them and people like them: he recalled the cars full of officers running away with their beautiful yellow trunks and their painted women, civil servants abandoning their posts, panic-stricken politicians dropping files of secret papers along the road, young girls, who had diligently wept the day the armistice was signed, being comforted in the arms of the Germans. “And to think that no one will know, that there will be such a conspiracy of lies that all this will be transformed into yet another glorious page in the history of France. We’ll do everything we can to find acts of devotion and heroism for the official records. Good God! To see what I’ve seen! Closed doors where you knock in vain to get a glass of water and refugees who pillaged houses; everywhere, everywhere you look, chaos, cowardice, vanity and ignorance! What a wonderful race we are!

European nation with highest politician/lover ratio: Few European states can hope to compete with France and Italy in this department, and the two nations have been battling for European political lothario supremacy for over thirty years. The contest has been increasingly acrimonious since 1998, when France was initially the clear winner but somehow “lost” sixty-eight illicit lovers in the recount and had to concede defeat. The following year was no less rocked in scandal, when the Italians were disqualified for “stretching the boundaries” of their elected representatives to include senior civil servants—and the crown was tossed back to France. No one was quite prepared for the disgraceful scandal the following year when it was discovered that one French minister had no mistress at all and “loved his wife,” a shocking revelation that led to his resignation and ultimately to the fall of the government.

...the establishment of a universal system of public education inevitably changed the relations of education to the state. It is this above all else which has caused the mind of our society to lose its independence, so that there is no power left outside politics to guide modern civilization, when the politicians go astray. For in proportion as education becomes controlled by the state, it becomes nationalized, and in extreme cases the servant of a political party.

Rightful King (The Sonnet) The rightful king is one who dissolves the kingdom. The rightful politician is one who dissolves the party. The rightful ruler is one who wants only to serve. The rightful citizen is always steadfast in accountability. Long live the Queen and Heil Hitler are one and the same, For both are sign of absolute allegiance without question. Allegiance to king and country keeps a land uncivilized, Allegiance to ideology and tradition destroys all ascension. Let there be no king and queen, let there be no kingdom, Let there be no party and let there be no authoritarianism. The force that builds a world doesn't come from bloodline, For character is beyond the grasp of our puny sectarianism. In a civilized society we are all king, we are all policymaker. The world advances when we advance as its fervent keeper.

But an Oxbridge education can make graduates feel that they are members of some privileged élite, destined to lead and make decisions that will be inflicted upon lesser beings. Such élitism must of necessity be based upon expectations that are often unfulfilled. Thus Oxbridge has not only provided Britain with its most notable politicians and civil servants but its most embittered traitors too.

As a civil servant or politician, you would do well to take the ubiquitous omission bias seriously—and even foster it. Case law shows how engrained such “moral distortion” is in our society. Active euthanasia, even if it is the explicit wish of the dying, is punishable by law, whereas deliberate refusal of lifesaving measures is legal (for example, following so-called DNR orders—do not resuscitate).

If I Were Head of State (The Sonnet) If I were the head of state, my first act in government will be, to dissolve the government, and redistribute all powers of society, to experts in their respective fields. Civil servants and experts run a nation anyway, While brainless politicians take all the credit. Time to give credit and power where they're due, Putting an end to the circus of representatives. Instead of trading one incompetent fool for another, We gotta rotate the civil servants office to office. In a civilized democracy, civilians are the law, Never you forget that, never let anyone forget it! If I were the head of state, that is the end of state. Dictatorships empower leaders, democracy empowers citizens.

If politicians disappear from the world, civil servants could easily do their job, because in reality, they already do. But if scientists disappear from the world, so will the world.

To her, Vichy was nothing but a nest of gossip, infighting, and intrigue, filled, as she put it, with the “aristocracy of defeat”—politicians, businessmen, civil servants, military officers, and others—all seeking jobs or other personal or political gain from the new government.

Only love can bring full freedom, all else brings half freedom. What is half freedom you ask? When in the name of freedom you imprison yourself to one side or sect, everything outside that sect seems evil. For example, fundamentalists choose the side of blind faith, and every act of reason seems like blasphemy - just like cold, sharp-tongue intellectuals choose the side of rationality even at the expense of humanity, and everything illogical seems outdated - or wait, I got a better one - so-called social activists often get so attached to their self-imposed identity of victimhood, that every person with a political, corporate, legal or bureaucratic background seems to appear as devil incarnate. This, my friend, is what I call "half freedom", which by the way, is far worse than the lack of freedom. And even though it manifests as an act of willful choice, when you get down to it, it's just plain old rigidity. And if we want to build a truly just, inclusive and progressive society, this hypocritical half-freedom won't do - what's needed is whole freedom - a kind of freedom that liberates the mind of all superstition as well as ignorant suspiciousness. It's time we realize, yelling about justice without using common sense is just as useless as keeping quiet. What this means is that, we gotta come together regardless of our background - the teacher, the scientist, the student, the copper, the politician, the civil servant, the entrepreneur, the economist, the janitor, the construction worker - every single person from every single walk of life must come forward surpassing all suspicious conspiracy, and contribute the best of their capacity in the making of a real civilized world.

When you blame Politicians, Civil servants or anybody. Check yourself too before we wreck ourselves because this is how Nigeria got into her present state. It's not about pointing fingers and blaming some set of people. The insecurity in the Country today is caused by the GREED in us. “Why” because we shouldn’t deceive ourselves by expecting angels from the land of EVIL PEOPLE of which you’re one. Nigeria can be great, Nigeria can do better if we restructure ourselves to restructure NIGERIA.

The electorate collaborated in its own disenfranchisement. In the public’s view, all politicians were corrupt, all civil servants inept, and every government little more than a Mafia plus an army. Once the public had been persuaded to cut the state down to size, the real Mafias took over.

In both London and Washington, and at the UN in New York, there were politicians and civil servants who took decisions that cost the lives of an incalculable number of people. They should bear full responsibility for those decisions.

West Pakistani soldiers, politicians, and civil servants dominated Pakistan’s government. Within a year of independence, Bengalis in East Pakistan were rioting in the streets, demanding recognition of their language, Bengali, as a national language. Soon thereafter, in the western wing of the country, ethnic Sindhis, Pashtuns (also known as Pathans), and Balochis also complained about the domination of the civil services and the military’s officer corps by ethnic Punjabis and Urdu-speaking migrants from northern India.

the civil servants for all their fine words about neutrality and independence are only as good as they are allowed to be by the politicians.

Common explanation for Pakistan’s relatively uninspiring economic performance is that the country’s riches are regularly plundered by corrupt politicians and civil servants, making it seem poorer than it is. Every military intervention in Pakistan’s politics has been predicated on the assumption that an honest general can help recover the billions of dollars siphoned from the economy and stashed in bank accounts abroad, though no large-scale repatriation of stolen Pakistani wealth has so far occurred.

Promotions and appointments are controlled by a rite of passage in the civil service called empanelment, which decides whether civil servants, predominantly officers of the IAS, can serve in Government of India as joint secretaries, additional secretaries and secretaries. Though officially the selection is done by a committee chaired by the cabinet secretary and comprising the home secretary, secretary personnel, and principal secretary to prime minister, and then approved by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet, no one really knows how it is actually done. The rules are changed whenever required to assist a political favourite as files apparently fly between South Block and 10 Janpath. Pencil entries are made deleting and adding candidates as per the dictates of the powerful, and the minutes of the original selection committee are signed only after agreements between the political masters, business houses and captive or powerful bureaucrats are reached. These proceedings are then smoothly approved by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet comprising the home minister and prime minister. The same controlling clique proceeds to appoint the convenient bureaucrat to high profile, lucrative ministries such as defence, home, finance, civil aviation, telecommunication, petroleum, urban development, steel etc. while officers without clout are consigned to residual ministries, normally the social sector ones. Potential for commissions and kickbacks determine which ministries must have captive bureaucrats, and these are the ministries that the DMK has traditionally claimed. The UPA added another dimension that cemented the politician-bureaucrat nexus by decreeing informally and formally that ministers have the right of choice of their secretaries. This meant that the empanelled secretary had to do the rounds of ministries where vacancies were imminent, and solicit his case for selection, unless some higher politician or business house had already spoken for him. And it would be naive to think that such an appointment would be pro bono publico. An honest bureaucrat has nowhere to turn for redressal as the relevant fora were also clearly controlled by the same mafia. With a sense of resignation all they could do is attempt a joke, ‘the Nair you are, the higher you are’!

Take the civil service out of government and the country will collapse, take politics out of government and the country will flourish.

It's the civil servants who run a country, not the politicians.

It takes thousands of people to turn an illegal political order into a democratic injustice. And as it happens, a huge portion of those people are civil servants. So, if even a handful of civil servants stand strong, responsible and conscientious, then no politician has the power in his pea-brain to do injustice to the people.

I give a call today to the civil servants around the world - yours is to serve, not the government, not the politicians, not even the constitution, but the people. You are the first servants of the society. On your shoulders, lies the responsibility of humanity's present and future. If the armed forces are our last line of defense in any corner of the world, then you are our first line of defense in every corner of the world. Injustice must ask your permission before entering the lives of the people. You, civil servants are the first vanguards of the society.

The politicians throw dirt at each other, the citizens throw dirt at the politicians, so everybody is living in dirt. If you want things to change, then stop throwing dirt and act, whether you are a politician, a civil servant or a civilian.