“Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it.”

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 46

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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)

Other

1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

Source: Damage

Source: Beauty Queens