Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Suppressing self-interest stifles creativity and initiative, leading to bureaucratic control.
In this quote, P. J. O'Rourke highlights the negative impact of suppressing individual self-interest, suggesting that when people are not allowed to pursue their own interests, it creates a heavy and ineffective bureaucratic system. This system removes the personal drive and creativity that individuals can bring, ultimately harming innovation and initiative within any organization or society.
Themes
Self-InterestCreativityBureaucracyInitiativeControl
In practice
Example use cases
A speech on the importance of entrepreneurship at a business conference.
More from P. J. O'Rourke
All quotes →Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
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Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
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Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
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The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
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