"Officialdom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cairo business should be finished, to go slowly up the Nile in native dress, and get at the truth of certain rumours which had disturbed officialdom at Cairo. At Denderah, Luxor, and two or three other places there had been "incidents," small but troublesome. English sightseers had complained of being hustled, and even insulted by the inhabitants ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... of officialdom in his manner. It was the sympathetic attitude of one friend towards another. Wills gulped down a strong mixture of brandy and soda which Bolt held out to him, and a tinge of colour returned to his ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... abomination. I quite understand it has points, and I do not attack from an aesthetic standpoint. It really looks well enough when it is painted white. There is, close to Christiansborg Castle, a patch of bungalows and offices for officialdom and wife that from a distance in the hard bright sunshine looks like an encampment of snow-white tents among the coco palms, and pretty enough withal. I am also aware that the corrugated-iron roof is an advantage in enabling you to collect and store rain-water, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... have its way, it would have lashed me in red tape, gagged me with Regulations, and sealing-waxed me up in my bed-room. And there are thousands of us who have shaken our fists under the nose of the War Office and shouted, "All your blighting, Man-with-the-Mudrake officialdom shan't prevent us from serving our country." And it hasn't! The very Government itself, in spite of its monumental efforts, has not been able to shackle us into inertia or drug us into apathy. Such non-combatant francs-tireurs in England have done ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... Flag was a correspondence exposing the misdeeds of some communal officials; but in the end the very persons who made the allegations ate humble pie. Evidently official pressure had been brought to bear, for red tape rampant might have been the heraldic device of Jewish officialdom. In no department did Jews exhibit more strikingly their marvellous powers of assimilation to ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... were bent on loot and rapine. By May, 1918, he appears to have been transformed into a perfect type of "Red" that deceived and terrorized the Russian population and gave credence to the Bolshevik assertion that "former officialdom is now acting with the proletariat." How well the diarist deceives the Bolsheviki and sustains this claim of Trotzky is fully revealed in the dramatic incidents recorded: nowhere in literature is found a better illustration ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... respect the peace as he might find expedient upon his arrival. The new governor was an honest, well-intentioned soul, neither mentally incapable nor lacking in personal courage. He might have served his King most acceptably in many posts of routine officialdom, but he was not the man to handle the destinies of half a continent in critical years. His mission, to be sure, was no sinecure, for the Iroquois had grown bolder with the assurance of support from the English. Now that they were securing arms and ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... more from Robin than that. I suppose I am a typical specimen of Conservative officialdom. Until Robin came into my house it had never occurred to me to ask myself why I was a Conservative: I had been born one, and it was difficult for me to understand how any man of ordinary intelligence could be ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... hostile to the public weal, and his work is penetrated by distrust of power as such. There was much in the history of the time to justify his attitude. It was difficult at that time to believe in an honest officialdom putting the commonwealth above every personal or corporate interest, and reformers naturally looked to individual initiative as the source of progress. Secondly, and this was a more philosophic argument, the individual was supposed to understand his own interest best, and as the common ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... describe the impression made upon the Poles by this attitude of the people of Russia. A prominent municipal worker of the City of Kalisz, with tears in his eyes, told me: "Up to the present moment Poland has been segregated from Russia by a wall of officialdom erected by the Germans; now for the first time this wall has been broken down, two peoples are seeing each other and ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... as a body because too many of them are machine-made creatures of routine? For my own part I honour the teachers as a body, if only because here and there one of them has dared, with splendid courage, to defy the despotism of custom, of tradition, of officialdom, of the thousand deadening influences that are brought to bear upon him, and to follow for himself the path of inwardness and life. To blame the average teacher for being unable to resist the pressure to which he is unceasingly exposed would be almost as unfair as to blame a pebble ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... his diplomatic skill being required in Downing Street. This was what he said, pleading his having to adjust some nice and knotty point of difference between the valiant King of Congo and the neighbouring and pugnacious Ja Ja, or else to remonstrate, in firm and equable language, as Officialdom knows so well how to do, against the repeated unjustifiable homicides of the despot of Dahomey, in sacrifice to his gods, beneath the sheltering shade of ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... evidently written by some friend of the Jesuits who was a lawyer—possibly by Fabian de Santillan, whom they appointed judge-conservator against the bishop. In it is a curiously lifelike and interesting picture of the dissensions that then involved all circles of Manila officialdom, both civil and religious; and of certain aspects of human nature which are highly interesting, even if not ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... through all the ramifications of public expenditure. Ireland, through no fault of her own, against her persistent protests, has been retained in a position which is destructive to thrifty instincts. A rain of officials has produced an unhealthy thirst for the profits of officialdom. No one feels responsibility for the money spent for national purposes, because no one in Ireland is, in any real sense, responsible. There is no Irish Budget or Irish Exchequer to make a separate Irish Government ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... "... certain that final processing will go forward today. It would be a gross understatement to say that the Carmack Case has captured the attention of the nation, both officialdom and public alike! Never in the history of Crime-Central has there been such an undercurrent of ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... incomes grow from three to six thousand francs, a climate where the bonus flourishes like a half-hardy annual in spite of some difficulties of culture. A characteristic trait that best reveals the feeble narrow-mindedness of these inhabitants of petty officialdom is a kind of involuntary, mechanical, and instinctive reverence for the Grand Lama of every Ministry, known to the rank and file only by his signature (an illegible scrawl) and by his title—"His Excellency Monseigneur le Ministre," five words which produce as much effect as the il Bondo ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... practice to absolute irresponsibility. Now irresponsibility is demoralising to any administration, however democratic be the principles upon which its officials are selected. A bureaucracy, ruling without proper external control, becomes a prey to the demons of red tape, routine, officialdom and place-hunting; it tends to stifle individual initiative and the sense of moral responsibility, since it forgets the real object of its existence—the good government of the country—in its passion for self-preservation and its desire to secure ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern, |
