One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy.
Interpretation
Bureaucracy can stifle progress and suffocate innovation if left unchecked.
Norman Borlaug's quote highlights the dangers of pervasive bureaucracy in society, suggesting that it can become an insidious force that hampers human advancement and creativity. The 'well camouflaged' nature of this bureaucracy implies that people may not even recognize the ways it can constrain freedom and effectiveness, leading to stagnation in various sectors.
In practice
In a speech on the importance of innovation in business, this quote serves as a warning against excessive bureaucracy.
During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago
We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life, we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care.
We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.
Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.
Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce.
This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.
I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties or talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties.
The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.
The texture and hardship of poverty and eviction is something that I think left the deepest impression on me, and I hope that I try to convey a little bit of that to the reader.
Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.
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