Civil Servant Quotes

Natalia Poklonskaya
Arthur Goldberg
Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges
Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet
Oliver Franks
Walter Terence Stace
Salil Shetty

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

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 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
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.

Ask a ferryman or a toll-keeper how many visitors come through daily on an average, and with an appearance of great intellectual discomfort he assures you the number varies so much.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

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

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

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

Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell
Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell
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.

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

Oliver Franks
Oliver Franks
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.

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

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

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

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

He hes done petuously devour,
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flouir,
The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all three;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

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.