Quotes

The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one.

There is no story that is not true.

Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details.

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

There is no combination of characters one can make — dhcmrlchtdj, for example — that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

I am the Beloved Child of the House.

Think slow, act fast: That's the secret of success.

The pattern was so clear that I started calling it the 'Iron Law of Megaprojects': over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.

Strategic misrepresentation is deliberate deception, and as such it is lying, per definition.

Whereas strategic misrepresentation is deliberate, optimism bias is nondeliberate. In the grip of optimism, people, including experts, are unaware that they are optimistic. They make decisions based on an ideal vision of the future rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs.

Kahneman and Tversky dubbed these two perspectives the 'inside view' (looking at the individual project in its singularity) and the 'outside view' (looking at a project as part of a class of projects, as 'one of those'). … To produce a reliable forecast, you need the outside view.

I've waited half my life for this day!

The foundations. I know. But God will provide.

The net isn't mine, Roger, and the folly isn't mine. It's God's Folly. Even in the old days he never asked men to do what was reasonable.

I have so much will, it puts all other business by. I am like a flower that is bearing fruit. There is a preoccupation about the flower as the fruit swells and the petals wither; a preoccupation about the whole plant, leaves dropping, everything dying but the swelling fruit.

It's like the appletree!

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real.

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

True journey is return.

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share.

You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

'Dignity' has to do crucially with a butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits. Lesser butlers will abandon their professional being for the private one at the least provocation. For such persons, being a butler is like playing some pantomime role; a small push, a slight stumble, and the facade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath. The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing.

Lord Darlington wasn't a bad man. He wasn't a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really — one has to ask oneself — what dignity is there in that?

Indeed — why should I not admit it? — at that moment, my heart was breaking.

You've got to enjoy yourself. The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it. That's how I look at it. Ask anybody, they'll all tell you. The evening's the best part of the day.

Miss Kenton, I will ask you not to excite yourself and to conduct yourself in a manner befitting your position. This is a very straightforward matter. If his lordship wishes these particular contracts to be discontinued, then there is little more to be said.

This is the stomach of the man this story is about. He has cancer of the stomach, but he is not yet aware of it. He has been merely passing the time, killing it, you might say. This is not how to be alive.

Life is brief, fall in love, maidens, before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within you, for those of you who know no tomorrow.

I make these silly little toys. But when I'm doing it, I feel as though I were friends with all the children of Japan.

Of course, the parks section did the actual construction work. But it was we who actually built the park. There was tremendous opposition from the residents. We had to fight them tooth and nail.

He didn't drink. He didn't take bribes. He didn't have any hobbies. He was just doing his job. That's what changed at the end. He realised what his job was.

Street-level bureaucrats develop conceptions of their work and of their clients that narrow the gap between their personal and work limitations and the service ideal.

The decisions of street-level bureaucrats, the routines they establish, and the devices they invent to cope with uncertainties and work pressures, effectively become the public policies they carry out.

Public policy is not best understood as made in legislatures or top-floor suites of high-ranking administrators. … To the mix of places where policies are made, one must add the crowded offices and daily encounters of street-level workers.

Resources are chronically inadequate relative to the tasks workers are asked to perform. The demand for services tends to increase to meet the supply. Goal expectations for the agencies in which they work tend to be ambiguous, vague, or conflicting. Performance oriented toward goal achievement tends to be difficult if not impossible to measure. Clients are typically nonvoluntary; partly as a result, clients for the most part do not serve as primary bureaucratic reference groups.

A certain degree of looking-the-other-way on the part of supervisors may be considered necessary to persuade officers to risk assault.

On the one hand, the work is often highly scripted to achieve policy objectives that have their origins in the political process. On the other hand, the work requires improvisation and responsiveness to the individual case.

You have to carry the fire. I don't know how to. Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

What's the bravest thing you ever did? He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.

He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect.

You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and'.

The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system's behavior.

Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable.

Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery.

Bureaucracies are not merely tools — they are also frameworks for the perceptual and cognitive work of organizations.

We have produced designs so complicated that we cannot anticipate all the possible interactions of the inevitable failures.

Most high-risk systems have some special characteristics that make accidents in them inevitable, even 'normal'.

The trick is to design a system that fails gracefully, in ways its operators can recognize and reverse.

Some systems we have built, are building, or are contemplating building have catastrophic potential, will inevitably suffer accidents of catastrophic potential, and should be abandoned.

Interactive complexity refers to the presence of unfamiliar sequences, or unplanned and unexpected sequences, and either not visible or not immediately comprehensible.

Tight coupling is a mechanical engineering term meaning there is no slack or buffer or give between two items. What happens in one directly affects what happens in the other.

The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.

Such knowledge is particular, by definition; it can be acquired only by local practice and experience.

Metis represents a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment.

Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—and often several steps—removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture.

Domination of Thailand and Burma was justified, in part, by the alleged anarchy of those who had successfully evaded state control.

Anticipation seeks to preserve stability by predicting and preventing disturbances. Resilience seeks to preserve stability by reacting to disturbances after they occur.

Trial without error is impossible. The question is what kind of errors a system can survive.

The richer countries are also the safer countries. Wealth provides the resources for adaptive response — the surplus that lets a society try things, fail, and try again.