“If everything you do is in order to do something else, when do you ever get to the end of it all?”

— William Nicholson

Source: The "Wind on Fire" Trilogy (2000-2003), Firesong (Book 3), p. 170

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William Nicholson 18

British screenwriter, playwright and novelist 1948

Philip Mulryne (1978) Northern Irish footballer

Source: Professional Footballer to Catholic Priest: The Story of Fr. Philip Mulryne https://www.tlcm.com.mt/2017/07/27/professional-footballer-to-catholic-priest-the-story-of-fr-philip-mulryne/ (July 2017)

“I think you approach everything from the viewpoint of the parish priest and when the bishop asks you to do something else, you do it the best you can.”

Gerald Thomas Walsh (1942) Catholic bishop

Bishop-elect Walsh's breadth of experience enables him to teach by example https://web.archive.org/web/20040912021719/http://www.cny.org:80/wl090204.htm (September 2004)

“There is no point in prioritizing doing your job when your organization faces being defunded in less than three months’ time if you don’t do something else: you do what’s necessary in order to ensure your organization survives, then you get back to work.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.
Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 16, “Democracy in Action” (pp. 311-312)

“Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening, and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do you know that everything's connetcted to everything else.”

Kim Edwards book The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Source: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“You need Power,
only when you want
to do something harmful
otherwise
Love is enough to get everything done.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

As quoted in The Federal Career Service: A Look Ahead (1954)
1950s
Variant: Now I think, speaking roughly, by leadership we mean the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.