“The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.”
Bk. I, Ch. 10
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)
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Charles Dickens 116
English writer and social critic and a Journalist 1812–1870Related quotes

Statement to a reporter in the Boston Record, 14 April 1903. (quoted in Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man's Life (1946), p. 122.)
Commonly paraphrased as "The most important office is that of the private citizen" or "The most important political office is that of the private citizen", and sometimes misattributed to his dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States.
Extra-judicial writings

Newsletter (UK) http://www.newsletter.co.uk/community/columnists/maurice-neill-upholding-our-right-to-accountability-1-3856967 "MAURICE NEILL: Upholding our right to accountability", 18 May 2012.
Attributed, In the Media

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 479.

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)
Source: Reflections on public administration, 1947, p. 19

Ashby v. White (1703), 2 Raym. 956.
Ashby v. White (1703)

"On Voting Rights for Actors and Jews" (21 December 1789)

“The thing I enjoyed most were visits from children. They did not want public office.”
On his years in the White House, in On Growing Up: Letters to American Boys and Girls (1962)