British Civil Servant Quotes

Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges
Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet
Oliver Franks
Walter Terence Stace
Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell

One feature which will probably most impress the mathematician accustomed to the rapidity and directness secured by the generality of modern methods is the deliberation with which Archimedes approaches the solution of any one of his main problems.

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

No scientific argument — by which I mean an argument drawn from the phenomena of nature — can ever have the slightest tendency either to prove or disprove the existence of God... science is irrelevant to religion.

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

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.

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

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

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

Conviction politicians, certainly: conviction civil servants, no.

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

It is proposed to invite the flower of our youth to the aid of public service.

Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet
Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet
Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

There are two reasons for making an appointment. Either there was nobody else; or there was somebody else.

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
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.

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