Quotes About Civil Servants

#1. Socialism would gather all power to
the supreme party and party leaders,
rising like stately pinnacles
above their vast bureaucracies of
civil servants no longer servants, no longer civil.

Winston Churchill

#2. People willy-nilly borrow for consumption. Civil servants willy-nilly borrow for consumption and then wonder why they don't have enough money at the end of the month.

Najib Razak

#3. The Municipal Councils in these areas excluded Chinese members, and the police and civil servants were foreigners. Even the names of the streets reflected foreign imperialism - such as Jessfield Road, on which St. Faith's was located.

Katherine Paterson

#4. Not all civil servants admire strong political leadership. But if you want to change things for the better you need strong political leadership.

Harriet Harman

#5. There are too many countries where the values we take for granted in our civil servants simply do not exist. Seeing these values in action, applied with dedication by hardworking individuals, makes me proud to lead a service that is making life better for millions across Britain.

Gus O'Donnell

#6. When politicians and civil servants hear the word culture they feel for their blue pencils.

Lionel Esher

#7. One of the keys to ensuring accountability is to have civil servants who witness fraud, waste and abuse to blow the whistle.

Byron Dorgan

#8. I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.

Charles McCarry

#9. Temporary teams of trusted people are generally sent to all Departments and to major agencies of government to assist in planning and to acquaint the incoming administration with the civil servants and bureaucracy that will remain in place in the new Administration.

Richard V. Allen

#10. As long as government is allowed to collect all Internet data, the perceived exigency will drive honest civil servants to reach more broadly and deeply into our networked lives.

Yochai Benkler

#11. Our problem in the 2015 general election was that for all the good stuff that was in the Labour manifesto, we were still going to be freezing public sector wages, cutting council expenditure, laying off civil servants. We were offering 'austerity light' instead of a real alternative.

Jeremy Corbyn

#12. As a consequence of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the officer corps of the old army became part of this class, as did that part of the younger generation who, in the old Germany, would have become officers or civil servants.

Gustav Stresemann

#13. I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.

James Cameron

#14. They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world.

Anthony Holden

#15. Civil servants have an extraordinary genius for wrapping up a simple idea to make it sound extremely complicated.

Jonathan Lynn

#16. The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.

Francois Truffaut

#17. There is a human capital crisis in the federal government. Not only are we losing the decades of talent as civil servants retire, we are not doing enough to develop and nurture the next generation of public servants.

Daniel Akaka

#18. Civil servants take forever to do anything.

Joseph Wambaugh

#19. In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.

Matt Ridley

#20. I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin's life, the literary and artistic.

Patrick Kavanagh

#21. It was one thing to say the president's politically appointed lawyers green-lighted domestic surveillance. It was another to claim a go-ahead from career civil servants, unbeholden to the White House.

Barton Gellman

#22. Civil servants are fully aware of the challenges the British economy faces. They are, after all, working tirelessly and professionally to support the coalition government through the current challenges, every day, and in every part of Britain.

Gus O'Donnell

#23. In Downing Street they called me 'Boss'. Civil servants would always call me 'Prime Minister'.

Tony Blair

#24. Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list
the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

Karl Marx

#25. The difference between civil servants and private businessmen is that when a central planner makes a mistake, he is likely to disrupt the whole economy and not just a single business.

Paul A. Cantor

#26. Some civil servants are neither servants nor civil.

Winston Churchill

#27. Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with, and I was not popular because of my criticism of the colonial service in Kenya.

Louis Leakey

#28. In a free society, the 'vision thing' is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a 'visionary' bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government ... the poorer and less free the people.

Ilana Mercer

#29. With bad laws and good civil servants it's still possible to govern. But with bad civil servants even the best laws can't help.

Otto Von Bismarck

#30. By creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#31. We need more people to go into business and fewer wasting our lives becoming bureaucrats and civil servants.

Michael O'Leary

#32. I'm a statistic in a system that a civil servant dominates.

Billy Joel

#33. I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I've thought of him like that often since, as if he's still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return.

China Mieville

#34. Marriage is a civil contract; people marry to better their worldly condition and improve appearances; it is an affair of house and furniture, of liveries, servants, equipage, and so forth. The

Charles Dickens