A Quote by Molly Ivins
In most legislatures, punctilious attention to correct usage is considered elitist. The word 'government,' for example, is normally pronounced 'gummint'; bureaucracy is 'bureaucacy'; fiscal comes out 'physical,' and one moves not to suspend the rules, but to 'suppend.'
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The government can become so elitist and concentrate on elitist interests. To help the government, you must constantly hold its attention.
Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.
Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
... the State Legislatures will jealously and closely watch the operations of this Government, and be able to resist with more effect every assumption of power, than any other power on earth can do; and the greatest opponents to a Federal Government admit the State Legislatures to be sure guardians of the people's liberty.
As a fiscal conservative, I believe one of the most important roles the federal government can play in assuring that our economy remains strong is to keep our fiscal house in order.
I think that for anybody who has worked in the civil society, government bureaucracy moves very very slowly.
State universities in Illinois are a microcosm of our state government - broken with work rules and administrative bureaucracy.
Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.
So it's not a thing that's a struggle. It's work, but it's not a struggle. It's fun. And she had a very particular way of emphasizing points and making her point, and that had to do with bringing out a word that you didn't normally think was the most important word in the sentence.
When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.
We want to send a clear message that the Mexican government won't endanger its fiscal position, and we will remain on a path of fiscal responsibility.
The great virtue of bureaucracy - indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.
Most of the tasks we do are for humans. For example, a tax calculation is counting numbers so the government can pull money out from my wallet, but government consists of humans.
I think we've probably all read a word that we've never heard pronounced out loud, and we try it out in a sentence and fall on our face.
It is by no means enough that an officer should be capable. . . . He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor. . . . No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate.
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