20th-century Civil Servant Quotes

Natalia Poklonskaya
Arthur Goldberg
Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges
Oliver Franks
Salil Shetty
Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell

My old cat is dead,
Who would butt me with his head.

The basic guarantees of our Constitution are warrants for the here and now, and unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason, they are to be promptly fulfilled.

Arthur Goldberg
Arthur Goldberg
Promotion of health generally by improving the standard of living. From the health point of view we are in this connexion first and foremost interested in the three fundamental environmental factors: housing (including family life), nutrition, and working conditions (including human relations as well as material conditions).

The business of the Civil Service is the orderly management of decline.

Parties come to power with silly, inconsistent and impossible policies because they have spent their whole period in opposition forgetting about the real world, destroying the lessons they learnt in government and clambering slowly back on to the ideological plain where they feel happiest.

I confidently expect that we [civil servants] shall continue to be grouped with mothers-in-law and Wigan Pier as one of the recognized objects of ridicule.

Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges
Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges
There are two reasons for making an appointment. Either there was nobody else; or there was somebody else.

My daughter looks at these pictures every day. She happily tells me, 'Mom, you're becoming an anime heroine in Japan,' which of course is very exciting for her. As for myself, though, I'm too busy to really pay much attention to the drawings.

Natalia Poklonskaya
Natalia Poklonskaya
Kailash Satyarthi has dedicated his life to helping the millions of children in India who are forced into slavery and work in torrid conditions. His award is an acknowledgement of the tireless, decades-long campaigning by civil society activists on child trafficking and child labor in India.

Salil Shetty
Salil Shetty
Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

The honours system gets to grade people. Graded grains make finer rice.

Conviction politicians, certainly: conviction civil servants, no.

I don't think you can investigate anything too rigorously, because you're not being fair to people unless you do that.

More weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear.

Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell
Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell
When I was a child, I spoke like a child. When I was an adult, I no longer spoke like a child. When I became old and wise, I spoke again like a child. I wish I had spoken all my life like a child.

The Pentagon, that immense monument to modern man's subservience to the desk.

Oliver Franks
Oliver Franks
I still believe that, in the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster. As I said earlier in this debate, our economic medicine may be painful but it is fast and powerful because it can act freely.

I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.

The acid test of any political decision is, 'What is the alternative?'