Officialdom Quotes & Sayings

The space between the young reader's eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril.' — Terry Pratchett

Living in South Africa and periodically coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya was just insane. — Binyavanga Wainaina

All through history it's the nations that have given most to generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall — Harry S. Truman

The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink. — Joseph Conrad

I have been offered the highest paid contracts in the world. I refused them all. It's not my thing. I don't want to cheat people. — Azzedine Alaia

It's an interesting thing in this country. I haven't won a gold medal, yet Australians still take me into their houses and hearts, they know my name and they care. I think Aussies like the little Aussie battler and the person who will stand up for their rights and I've never been short of a word, especially with officialdom. — Raelene Boyle

I imagined my first night alone in bed with my stranger. I conjured our future years together unhampered by worries about money or officialdom. We would enjoy the day, the night, a smile, a word, a kiss, a glance. All lovely thoughts. All pointless dreams. — Lisa See

With the growth of Harvard from a small provincial college into a great University, a unique paranoia has swept the ranks of local officialdom, furrowing brows throughout University Hall. The lurking fear is that somehow, in the operations of the gigantic administrative machine, a student might get lost in the shuffle. — J. Anthony Lukas

People falling in love for one reason may fall out of love due to another reason. However, if faith or trust is the basis of love, it does not break easily. Often people use all their reasoning to understand each other and even live together for years to satisfy themselves that they are in love. However, marriages based on such logical love, the love based on reason, do not last long. Quite to the contrary, marriages where the partners do not even know each other, survive for life - being based on mutual trust and faith. — Awdhesh Singh

The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. — Taylor Caldwell

Siberia taught Dostoyevsky much that would be fictionalized in Demons, including criminal speech, the criminal mind and the ways of officialdom. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Liao writes with the courage of a man who knows loss and doesn't fear it. There is nothing to make him notice like an official injunction against noticing, nothing to make him listen like official deafness, nothing that drives him to make us see like the blindness that officialdom seeks to impose. — Liao Yiwu

The brutal intrusion of officialdom into private devastation. — Robert Galbraith

False hope is worse than despair. — Jonathan Kozol

Intellectual freedom is essential
freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. — Andrei Sakharov

The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall. — Taylor Caldwell

If high-tech companies are serious about doing the right thing, they can join together and lobby for more transparency and accountability in the way in which Chinese officialdom deals with Internet services. — Rebecca MacKinnon

If you look at our world, it's a world of critique. — Jose Canseco

In China the underworld and officialdom have interpenetrated and become one. Criminal elements have become officialized as officials have become criminalized. — Liu Xiaobo

She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'. — Joan Didion

The protocol things, the officialdom, are part of my work. But it doesn't take more than 20 percent of my time. The majority of my time I spend on issues that I care about. — Queen Rania Of Jordan

Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders. — Martha Gellhorn

Darlin', he is so damn sexy that my underpants crawled all the way to my ankles. — Carolyn Brown

Such is the control, and such the public mentality, enjoyed by the Swedish planners. The rulers of the Soviet Union, although favoured by despotic power, are not so fortunate. Obstructively resentful of officialdom, the Russian, in the words of the Spanish saying, has always known how orders are 'to be obeyed but not carried out'. To the Swede, that sort of compromise is downright immoral. His elected leaders have received those political blessings denied the autocrats in the Kremlin: compliant citizens and an unopposed bureaucracy. — Roland Huntford