Words matter. These are the best Elliot Richardson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.
My most important task must be an attempt to bring the monster under democratic direction and control.
For you, the state is an entity with purposes of its own that the people can be required to serve. For us the word is only a label for the arrangements by which we the people delegate to some among us responsibility for things that concern us in common.
It often seemed like we had become a nation where the only heroes were rock singers and ball players and that there were no large men of probity who could be called upon for the task.
But tending machinery was one thing; defining what we were trying to do and why we were doing it, and developing ways to measure how well the job was done – this was something else again.
I hope you will respond to the crisis of confidence that Watergate has created by opening up your administration and reaching out to people in a more magnanimous spirit.
People have moved beyond apathy, beyond skepticism into deep cynicism.
If the large power voluntarily abstains from using its full power or feels the strategic situation to be such that it cannot do so, it in effect loses the advantage of being a big power.
The vice president had a bargaining asset, however, that no ordinary person has: He was next in line to the presidency. I saw no chance that he would resign first, then take his chances on trial, conviction, and jail.
I had come to regard the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations as a tragic mistake.
