Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and build walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don't need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on.
Ben Aaronovitch
Quotes to Explore
Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.
William S. Burroughs
The clearer and deeper the public opinion of the world, in the first instance the opinion of the working masses, will understand the contradictions and the difficulties of the socialist development of an isolated country, the higher will it appreciate the results achieved. The less it identifies the fundamental methods of Socialism with the zigzags and errors of the Soviet bureaucracy, the less will be the danger that, by the inevitable revelation of these errors and of their consequences, the authority, not only of the present ruling group, but of the workers' State itself, may decline.
Leon Trotsky
The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is….we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism.
Hannah Arendt
I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
William Gibson
The sole function of education... to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.
Albert Einstein
The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.
George Bernard Shaw
This nation was founded on the principle of wealth creation. As
a young Henry Clay said in the House of Representatives in 1812,
“It wealth creation is a passion as unconquerable as any with which
nature has endowed us. You may attempt to regulate—you cannot
destroy it.” That is supposed to be the federal government’s primary objective.
It is supposed to promote the creation of an environment conducive
to the creation of wealth—not job creation, not bailouts, not subsidies,
not expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and not providing lifetime
support to those who choose not to take advantage of the innumerable
opportunities that exist in this nation for them to create a better,
more productive life for themselves.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
I've always straddled a weird line - there's a lot of mainstream stuff that I love. At the same, I still feel like an outsider. I'm the outsider who's on the inside.
Zooey Deschanel
Life is not all fun and easy going. Far from it; there are many rough times. But, sadly, we too often let the hard times dull our enthusiasm. And that is dangerous, if not fatal, to our lives.
Norman Vincent Peale
As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and build walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don't need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on.
Ben Aaronovitch