On Subsistence, (2 December 1792)
Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, “Unlimited Government” (Dec. 29, 1961).
Speech to the Los Angeles Town Club, Los Angeles, California (11 September 1952); Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952), p. 36
Context: In the tragic days of Mussolini, the trains in Italy ran on time as never before and I am told in their way, their horrible way, that the Nazi concentration-camp system in Germany was a model of horrible efficiency. The really basic thing in government is policy. Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy, but good administration can never save bad policy.
“The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.”
Speech at the Melodeon, on the first anniversary of the rendition of Thomas Sims (12 April 12 1852), published in Speeches, Letters and Lectures by Wendell Phillips https://archive.org/details/speecheslectures7056phil (1884), p. 91.
1850s
“Being a good administrator and a bad politician, Pombal was not always a happy legislator.”
Le Marquis de Pombal, p. 374
Le marquis de Pombal (1869)
“The good needs fear no law,
It is his safety and the bad man's awe.”
The Old Law (c. 1615–18; printed 1656), with Thomas Middleton and William Rowley.
Part XI, ch. 57 (Bea Schachter)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: Adminstrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being. In schools, adminstrators commonly become myopic as a result of confronting all of the problems the "requirements" generate. Thus they cannot see (or hear) the constituents the system ostensibly exists to serve — the students. The idea that the school should consist of procedures specifically intended to help learners learn strikes many administrators as absurd — and "impractical." …Eichmann, after all, was "just an adminstrator." He was merely "enforcing requirements." The idea of "full time administrators" is palpably a bad one — especially in schools — and we say to hell with it. Most of the "administration" of the school should be a student responsibility. If schools functioned according to the democratic ideals they pay verbal allegience to, the students would long since have played a major role in developing policies and procedures guiding its operation. One of the insidious facts about totalitarianism is its seeming "efficiency." …Democracy — with all of its inefficiency — is still the best system we have so far for enhancing the prospects of our mutual survival. The schools should begin to act as if this were so.
