Stanley The Office Quotes

So what do you do when you are stuck? The first thing I do when I am stuck is pray. But I’m not talking about a quick, Help me Lord, Sunday’s a comin’ prayer. When I get stuck I get up from my desk to head for my closet. Literally. If I‘m at the office I go over to a corner that I have deemed my closet away from home. I get on my knees and remind God that this was not my idea, it was His… None of this is new information to God… Then I ask God to show me if there is something He wants to say to prepare me for what He wants me to communicate to our congregation. I surrender my ideas, my outline and my topic. Then I just stay in that quiet place until God quiets my heart… Many times I will have a breakthrough thought or idea that brings clarity to my message. . . Like you, I am simply a mouthpiece. Getting stuck is one way God keeps me ever conscious of that fact.

. . . Mrs. Lambchop sighed and shook her head. "You're at the office all day, having fun," she said. "You don't realize what I go through with the boys. They're very difficult." Kids are like that," Mr. Lambchop said. "Phases. Be patient, dear.

Any admonition that declares that we must rule should be checked with the immediate reminder that Christ did not. It is the cross—not the boardroom, not the Oval Office, and not the box office—that is the absolute center of the Kingdom of God.

In the United States, the two-party system works as a way to manufacture an artificial group identity, akin to an ethnic or national one or an allegiance to a sports team. Part of the identity seems to consist in allegiance to certain conclusions on a range of “hot button” political issues. On those issues, political party affiliation does seem to result in rigidly held belief and loyalty in the voting booth. Allegiance to the group identity forged by political party affiliation renders Americans blind to the essential similarities between the agendas of the two parties, similarities that can be expected to be exactly the ones that run counter to public interest, in other words, those interests of the deep-pocketed backers of elections to which any politician must be subservient in order to raise the kind of money necessary to run for national office. Satisfaction at having one’s group “win” seems to override the clearly present fundamental dissatisfaction with the lack of genuine policy options.33 If the function of the two parties is to hide the fact that the basic agenda of both is shared, and irrational adherence to one of the two parties is used propagandistically to mask their fundamental overlap, then we can see how Burnham’s prediction may have come to pass, despite the existence of two distinct political parties.

in the United States, the mortality rate for pregnancy is 17.4 per 100,000 people. The on-duty murder rate for police officers is 13.5 per 100,000 people. Which means a pregnant woman is more likely to die due to that pregnancy than a police officer is to be killed on the job.

Eleven stories above Brooklyn Heights in a 659,000-square-foot building that also housed Morgan Stanley and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Hillary’s top aides were as miserable as midlevel bureaucrats in an agency with no clear plans for how to attain its mission. They

The executives that ran Lehman Bros. into the ground several years ago had a macho culture that abhorred personal time. One executive was pressured to go to the office while his wife was actually delivering a baby.[18] Whether such assiduity resulted in a better work product has now been pretty definitively ascertained.

Stanley Hauerwas explains his love for praying “other people’s prayers”: “Evangelicalism,” he says, “is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired.” He calls himself an advocate for practicing prayer offices because, We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. . . . There’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.

A number of Ford engineers arrived at Derby, and spent some months examining and familiarizing themselves with the drawings and manufacturing methods. One day their Chief Engineer appeared in Lovesey’s office, which I was then sharing, and said, ‘You know, we can’t make the Merlin to these drawings’. I replied loftily, ‘I suppose that is because the drawing tolerances are too difficult for you, and you can’t achieve the accuracy’. ‘On the contrary’, he replied, ‘the tolerances are far too wide for us. We make motor cars far more accurately than this. Every part on our car engines has to be interchangeable with the same part on any other engine, and hence all parts have to be made with extreme accuracy, far closer than you use. That is the only way we can achieve mass production’.

ninety POWs from the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment were executed by grenade and rifle-fire by the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment in a crowded barn at Wormhout, near the Franco-Belgian border.39 On seeing two grenades tossed into the crowded barn, Sergeant Stanley Moore and Sergeant-Major Augustus Jennings leapt on top of them to shield their men from the blasts. These despicable, cold-blooded massacres give lie to the myth that it was desperation and fear of defeat towards the end of the war that led the SS to kill Allied POWs who had surrendered; in fact such inhumanity was there all along, even when Germany was on the eve of her greatest victory. Although the officer responsible for Le Paradis, Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Fritz Knochlein, was executed in 1949, Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke, who commanded the unit that carried out the Wormhout atrocity, was never punished for this war crime and died in 2001 in a Hamburg retirement home.

Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, said, “A couple of lovebirds have strayed into the office without an appointment. They insist it’s a matter of life and death.” “Everything is,” Mason said. “If you start with the idea of perpetuating life, you must accept the inevitable corollary of death—but I presume these people aren’t interested in my philosophical ideas.” “These people,” Della Street announced, “are interested in each other, in the singing of the birds, the blue of the sky, the moonlight on water, the sound of the night wind in the trees.” Mason laughed. “It’s infectious. You are getting positively romantic, poetic, and show evidence of having been exposed to a highly contagious disease . . . . Now, what the devil would two lovebirds want with the services of a lawyer who specializes in murder cases?

Fastidious about personal hygiene, he couldn’t stand to be around anybody who was ill. If this was unavoidable, he insisted that they—and everybody else on the set or in the office—wear surgical masks to lessen the danger of germs spreading.

On another occasion, Alinsky was working in his home base of Chicago to force Chicago’s department stores to give jobs to black activists who were Alinsky’s cronies. On this issue of course Alinsky was competing—or working in tandem, however we choose to view it—with Chicago’s number one racial shakedown man, Jesse Jackson. Jackson mastered a simple strategy of converting race into a protection racket. He would offer to “protect” Chicago businesses from accusations of racism—accusations that the businesses knew were actually fomented by Jackson himself. The businesses would then pay Jackson to make the trouble go away, and also to chase away other potential troublemakers. In return for his efforts, Jackson would typically receive hundreds of thousands in annual donations from the company, plus jobs and minority contracts that would go through his network, and finally other goodies such as free flights on the corporate airplane, supposedly for his “charitable work.” Later Jackson would go national with this blackmail approach. In New York, for example, Jackson opened an office on Wall Street where he extracted millions of dollars in money and patronage from several leading investment houses including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber, and Prudential Securities. On the national stage, another race hustler, Al Sharpton, joined Jackson. For two decades these shakedown men in clerical garb successfully prosecuted their hustles. Jackson was the leader at first, but eventually Sharpton proved more successful than Jackson. While Jackson’s star has faded, Sharpton became President Obama’s chief advisor on race issues.

did you ever hear of a politician who wasn’t elected on a platform of economy in office?” “That isn’t it,” I said. “Oh yes it is, lover. I can remember way back. Even then all politicians were promising economy, and still it wasn’t new. They’d always hold up the extravagances of the past administration before the horrified eyes of the voters. They’d pledge greater economy and get elected.—And there’s never a case on record, lover, where a politician hasn’t spent more than his predecessor in office.

Loftus clenched his right fist, extended it in front of him, and gently lowered it to the desk. There was something more impressive in the gesture than would have been the case had he banged the top of the desk with explosive violence. “I don’t like criminal lawyers,” he said. “Neither do I,” Mason admitted, seating himself in what appeared to be the most comfortable chair in the office. “But you’re a criminal lawyer.” “It depends upon what you mean,” Mason observed. “I’m a lawyer. I’m not a criminal.” “You defend criminals.” “What is your definition of a criminal?” Mason asked. “A man who has committed a crime.” “And who decides that he has committed a crime?” “Why, a jury, I suppose.” “Exactly,” Mason said, with a smile. “So far, I have been very fortunate in having juries agree with me that the persons I represented were not criminals.” Loftus said, “That isn’t conclusive.” “Judges think it is,” Mason said, still smiling.

Shackleton was an officer junior to Scott, on a British Navy expedition.

In battle, refusal or hesitation to follow orders can spell disaster. But at the same time, the rigid hierarchy and absolute power of officers slows down execution and stifles rapid adaptation by the soldiers closest to the fight.

Even upon liberation, when revenge against their tormentors at last became possible, mass uprisings very rarely occurred. “Even when the whole system was overthrown by the Allies,” says David Rousset writing of Buchenwald, “nothing happened. . . . The American officer appointed to command

News in abundance was offered in return. The porters of the Livingstone East-Coast Aid Expedition had plenty to relate to the porters sent by Mr. Stanley. Mirambo's war dragged on its length, and matters had changed very little since they were there before, either for better or for worse. They found the English officers extremely short of goods; but Lieut. Cameron, no doubt with the object of his Expedition full in view, very properly felt it a first duty to relieve the wants of the party that had performed this Herculean feat of bringing the body of the traveller he had been sent to relieve, together with every article belonging to him at the time of his death, as far as this main road to the coast.

He therefore determined to hire a hatchet man to do the nasty work for him, bringing in a former McKinsey operative and giving him the title of Chief Operating Officer. This COO was himself quite expensive, his salary, bonus, long-term compensation, and perquisites amounting to the cost of several hundred smaller jobs. He at once targeted Law, Accounting, Public Relations, Event Planning, Office Services, and several other formerly integrated departments for extreme unction, although he did spare the executive chef. “This place is way fat,” he told the CEO, who knew he was full of shit but admired the zeal with which he justified his compensation.

Six months later, when the cutbacks were all done, the Chief Executive Officer fired this very same hatchet man with exactly the same words. “What a bastard,” said the CEO to himself as he started the search for a new second banana, a search he didn’t actually have time to complete before his new bosses at the hedge fund took him out, a step that cost them $147 million in severance but that they still considered a good investment. “What a bunch of losers,” said the hedge fund officers. And then they had lunch.

Oh, Mary, that’s no problem at all,” Rosie said. She turned to Bradley. “Should I be packing heat?” “Rosie, as a sworn law enforcement officer in the state of Illinois, I have to inform you that it is illegal to carry a concealed firearm on your person,” Bradley said. Stanley snorted. “What he’s saying is, yes, you ninny, pack heat, but don’t tell him about it.

When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he inherited a penal system that had been shedding prisoners. The 1960s produced the single largest reduction in the population of federal and state prisons in the nation’s history, with 16,500 fewer inmates in 1969 than in 1950. Despite this trend toward decarceration, under the auspices of the Nixon administration the federal government began to construct prisons at unprecedented rates.

So in the eighth circle are the liars, flatterers, and sellers of office, the fortune tellers, hypocrites, and thieves, the pimps and grafters, and all such scum.

Perry Mason turned his back to the morning sunlight which streaked in through the windows of his private office and regarded the pile of unanswered mail with a frown. 'I hate this office routine,' he said. Della Street, his secretary, glanced up at him with eyes that contained a glint of amusement in their cool, steady depths. Her smile was tolerant. 'I presume,' she said, 'having just emerged from one murder case, you'd like another.' 'Not necessarily a murder case,' he told her, 'but a good fight in front of a jury. I like dramatic murder trials, where the prosecution explodes an unexpected bomb under me, and, while I'm whirling through the air, I try to figure how I'm going to light on my feet when I come down... What about this chap with the glass eye?' 'Mr. Peter Brunold,' she said. 'He's waiting for you in the outer office. I told him you'd probably delegate his case to an assistant. He said he'd either see you or no one.' 'What does he look like?' 'He's about forty, with lots of black, curly hair. He has an air of distinction about him and he looks as though he'd suffered. He's the type of man you'd pick for a poet. There's something peculiar in his expression, a soulful, sensitive something. You'll like him, but he's the type that would make business for you, if you ask me-a romantic dreamer who would commit an emotional murder if he felt circumstances required him to do it.' 'You can readily detect the glass eye?' Mason inquired. 'I can't detect it at all,' she said, shaking her head. 'I always thought I could tell an artificial eye as far as I could see one, but I'd never know there was anything wrong with Mr. Brunold's eye.' 'Just what was it he told you about his eye?' 'He said he had a complete set of eyes-one for morning-one for evening-one slightly bloodshot-one...' Perry Mason smacked his fist against his palm. His eyes glinted. 'Take away that bunch of mail, Della,' he commanded, 'and send in the man with the glass eye. I've fought will contests, tried suits for slander, libel, alienation of affections, and personal injuries, but I'm darned if I've ever had a case involving a glass eye, and this is going to be where I begin. Send him in.

This is poignantly illustrated in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut. Bill and Alice have just returned from a lavish black-tie Christmas party that has sparked a conversation about sex. Bill has always assumed that Alice, like him, is essentially incapable of infidelity. “You’re my wife and my child’s mother and I’m sure of you. You’d never be unfaithful. I’m sure of you.” Alice, outraged at his presumption and emboldened by a joint they have just smoked, decides to enlighten him. She describes in agonizing detail just how powerful the presence of the other can be, even when it is nothing more than a mirage. She tells him of her febrile fantasy about a naval officer she desired from a distance. They never met; nonetheless, his instant hold on her was so strong she would have given up everything if he’d only asked. She also says that this happened on a day when she and Bill had just made love, and Bill had never been dearer to her. Bill is devastated by his wife’s revelation, and he spends the rest of the film trying to avenge the betrayal and restore order to his broken world. What struck me is that, for Bill, a fantasy could generate the same sense of violation as an actual affair. Bill is like many of the partners I meet. His security rests not only on what Alice does but also on what she thinks. Her fantasies are proof of her freedom and separateness, and that scares him. The third points to other possibilities, choices we didn’t make, and in this way it’s bound up with our freedom. Laura Kipnis says, “What is more anxiogenic than a partner’s freedom, which might mean the freedom not to love you, or to stop loving you, or to love someone else, or to become a different person than the one who once pledged to love you always and now…perhaps doesn’t?” If she can think about others, she might love others, and that is intolerable.

The Rat Office was at the top of the East Gate Lookout Tower. Stanley took the quick route, running along the top of the Castle wall, over The Hole in the Wall Tavern, which even Stanley did not know existed. The rat quickly reached the Lookout Tower and scurried into a large drainpipe that ran up the side. Soon he emerged at the top, jumped onto the parapet and knocked on the door of a small hut bearing the

later used a specific question when talking to junior officers and sergeants in small bases in Afghanistan: “If I told you that you weren’t going home until we win—what would you do differently?” At first they would chuckle, assuming I was joking, but soon realized I wasn’t. At that point most became very thoughtful

Edward IV’s ‘regional’ policy: The stimulus for this investigation was D.A.L. Morgan’s analysis of Edward IV’s second reign… Morgan proceeded to explain that this ‘territorial re-ordering’ was designed to cure disorder and lawlessness in the localities. Thus, Morgan suggested, Edward intended ‘the creation of an apanage’ for his second son, Richard, Duke of York, and that ‘by 1475 the plan was to endow him with a collection of lands in the East Midlands’. Also, the king ‘bent his efforts to making his elder son’s household at Ludlow the governing power in Wales and the West Midlands...and similarly to establishing his brother [Richard, Duke of] Gloucester as heir to the Neville lands and ruler of the North’. Furthermore ‘1474 saw the scheme pushed forward...and the beginning of an apanage endowment for the king’s stepson Thomas Grey [Marquess of Dorset] in the South-West’. Moreover, Edward’s ‘two leading household men were fitted in as the heads of further regional blocs’: his steward, Thomas, Lord Stanley, was ‘made undoubted ruler of Lancashire’, while ‘in Cheshire and north-east Wales also Stanley power was extended’ through Stanley’s brother, William; and the king’s chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, ‘similarly emerged in 1474 as ruler of the North Midlands from Rockingham to the Peak’ (pp. 1–2). …the concept of Edward IV’s provincial policy raises much broader questions… whether this regional policy was planned or unintentional, and also as to whether its consequences were constructive or destructive. Furthermore, in a broader context, Edward’s scheme also suggests the importance of issues concerning the concept of regions, with potential implications for our study of politics and government in the localities, as well as questions regarding royal authority, governance, and the constitution, in general, in the later fifteenth century (p. 5). …This topic [Arbitration] is inseparable from the wider consideration of justice, and law and order, and these aspects could be the subject of substantial research in themselves; hence the remit of this study is specifically limited to questions of politics and governance. Arbitration of disputes may indicate a magnate’s influence and local standing, but this is, of course, not the only way in which to ascertain a magnate’s power in the localities: consideration of his estates, offices, and clientele reveals the extent to which his lordship pervaded local society (p. 8).

The lesson boils down to this: hanging a Risk sign on offices is irrelevant if they lack the influence to shift organizational decision-making. Our structures are not effective in name alone—accountability and authority have to be operationalized to best posture ourselves against risk.

On August 11, 1934, Stanley Ferson walked off the Morro Castle when she docked in New York. His sudden departure baffled Alagna and a number of ship’s officers; thirty-seven years would pass before the extraordinary circumstances behind Ferson’s resignation were revealed. With his departure, Rogers became chief radio officer, Alagna regained his old position as first assistant radioman, and Maki—absent during the furor—returned to complete the team. As far as Maki was concerned, “Rogers ran an easy shop. You did your job, and you relaxed the way you liked.” Alagna, on the other hand, found it difficult to relax. He had started to get “the creeps.” He believed somebody was trying to waylay him, possibly even kill him, for the trouble he had caused. “I thought several times that I heard footsteps hurrying along behind me in the shadows of the deck. But each time, when I swung around to investigate, the deck would be vacant. I could neither see nor hear anyone when I was sure someone had been there but a moment before.” It may have been this stress which finally sealed the fate of George Alagna. On this trip, one day out of New York, as the Morro Castle steamed through the Florida Strait on her way to Havana, Alagna had been on radio duty. Suddenly he raced to the bridge and accused the watch officer, Second Officer Ivan Freeman, of tinkering with the radio compass on the bridge, jamming the main radio transmitter. It was a ridiculous allegation; moreover, it offended Freeman’s sense of propriety. Junior radiomen did not come to the bridge unless it was with a specific message; they certainly did not assail the officer of the watch. Freeman complained to Chief Officer Warms, who reported the incident to the captain. Captain Wilmott sent a signal to the Radiomarine Corporation demanding the immediate removal of Alagna on their return to New York.

She flowed across that office with the rippling, effortless progress of a cylinder of jelly sliding off a tilted plate.

Stanley, meanwhile, slogged through the rain forest at the head of the vanguard column, sentencing a deserter to be hanged and ordering numerous floggings, some of which he administered himself. Supply snafus meant that much of the time his porters and soldiers were near starvation. To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley’s officers wrote in his diary, “We finished our last plantain to-day . . . the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women.” When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, “Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round.” Another described the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt: It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day’s work.

Stanley Trezevant III has been involved in the development of various office and retail products. He co-founded Trezevant Properties before establishing TRC and has since been recognized for his contributions to the industry.

About ten miles away Third Officer Charles Victor Groves stood on the bridge of the Leyland Liner Californian bound from London to Boston. A plodding 6,000-tonner, she had room for 47 passengers, but none were being carried just now. On this Sunday night she had been stopped since 10:30 P.M., completely blocked by drifting ice. At about 11:10 Groves noticed the lights of another ship, racing up from the east on the starboard side. As the newcomer rapidly overhauled the motionless Californian, a blaze of deck lights showed she was a large passenger liner. Around 11:30 he knocked on the Venetian door of the chart room and told Captain Stanley Lord about it. Lord suggested contacting the new arrival by Morse lamp, and Groves prepared to do this. Then, at about 11:40, he saw the big ship suddenly stop and put out most of her lights. This didn’t surprise Groves very much. He had spent some time in the Far East trade, where they usually put deck lights out at midnight to encourage the passengers to turn in. It never occurred to him that perhaps the lights were still on … that they only seemed to go out because she was no longer broadside but had veered sharply to port.

This is Bad. Sindbad, I mean." I'd wanted to name him after a great explorer, but none of them seemed to fit. Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Stanley were obvious choices (Mr. Locke so admired them he even had Stanley's own revolver on display in his office, a narrow-nosed Enfield that he cleaned and oiled on a weekly basis), but they made me think of that shriveled African arm in its glass case. Magellan was too long, Drake too boring, Columbus too bumbling; in the end I'd named him after the only explorer who rendered the world stranger and more wondrous with each voyage.

Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none is really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: “The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice. The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning.” Of course, this can’t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it’s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of “desirable but impure” fits cocktails to a tee. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of “many years ago” were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with “the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo, which in English means ‘Cock’s tail.’ ” The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the etymology of cocktail—again, dated “many years ago”—concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers. The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails—the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in America, by Bill Bryson, who explains that in the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, a scorpion is called a kaktel. Could it be that the sting in the cocktail is related to the sting in the scorpion’s tail? It’s doubtful at best. One of the most popular tales told about the first drinks known as cocktails concerns a tavernkeeper by the name of Betsy Flanagan, who in 1779 served French soldiers drinks garnished with feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s roosters. The soldiers toasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” William Grimes, however, points out in his book Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink that Flanagan was a fictional character who appeared in The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. He also notes that the book “relied on oral testimony of Revolutionary War veterans,” so although it’s possible that the tale has some merit, it’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. A fairly plausible narrative on this subject can be found in Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’em, by Stanley Clisby Arthur, first published in 1937. Arthur tells the story of Antoine Amedie Peychaud, a French refugee from San Domingo who settled in New Orleans in 1793. Peychaud was an apothecary who opened his own business, where, among other things, he made his own bitters, Peychaud’s, a concoction still available today. He created a stomach remedy by mixing his bitters with brandy in an eggcup—a vessel known to him in his native tongue as a coquetier. Presumably not all Peychaud’s customers spoke French, and it’s quite possible that the word, pronounced coh-KET-yay, could have been corrupted into cocktail. However, according to the Sazerac Company, the present-day producers of Peychaud’s bitters, the apothecary didn’t open until 1838, so there’s yet another explanation that doesn’t work.

Trumbull, get the fuck out of my office and pay attention to your own goddamn business,” he said in the icy tone he sometimes used when irritated.

It’s the same lesson that Navy SEAL commandos learn during a modern version of Stanley’s ordeals: the famous Hell Week test of continual running, swimming, crawling, and shivering that they must endure on less than five hours’ sleep. At least three-quarters of the men in each SEAL class typically fail to complete training, and the survivors aren’t necessarily the ones with the most muscles, according to Eric Greitens, a SEAL officer. In recalling the fellow survivors of his Hell Week, he points out their one common quality: “They had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear, and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the ‘fist’ of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others.