Category: Thought

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Jerry Pournelle, at jerrypournelle.com.

The foremost, or indeed the sole, condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), as quoted in Robert Nisbet, The New Despotism (1976).

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

Jerry Pournelle & Larry Niven, Lucifer’s Hammer (1985).

Life is the true mystery, not because impenetrable by thought, but because thought penetrates it to the infinite with power equal to its own.

Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic (1913; 1967), Douglas Ainslie, trans., p. 590.

They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.

Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (1641).

The fact is: almost everything is funny. You just have to have a way of looking at it.

It is the logic of our times, 
No subject for immortal verse — 
That we who lived by honest dreams 
Defend the bad against the worse.

Cecil Day-Lewis, Where are the War Poets? (1943).

Il faut toujours en fait de nouvelles attendre
le sacrement de la confirmation.

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, Letter to Charles-Augustin Ferriol, comte d’Argental (August, 28, 1760).

If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.

Letter to Adlai Stevenson (November 5, 1959), quoted in The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer : A Biography(1984), by Jackson J. Benson, p. 876.

La superstition met le monde entier en flammes;
la philosophie les éteint.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1822), “Superstition.”