Parkinson's Law of Social Work

It's well known that social problems increase to occupy the total number of social workers available to deal with them.
Jim Hacker remarks.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Press 'release'

If in doubt, always issue an absolute denial. And if you're going to lie, then lie with one hundred per cent conviction.
Jim Hacker's strategy of handling politically tricky questions from the media.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Decision: not(e) approved

…I was sure a way could be found to alter any adverse decision.
He thought a decision was a decision. I explained that a decision is a decision only if it is the decision you wanted. Otherwise, of course, it is merely a temporary setback.
Sir Humphrey Appleby elucidating a bureaucrat's point of view on 'firm' ministerial decisions.
The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

The Banker Debunked

I remarked that he had not read the Financial Times this morning.
'Never do,' he told me. I was surprised. He was a banker after all.
'Can't understand it,' he explained. 'It's too full of economic theory.'
I asked him why he bought it and carried it about under his arm. He explained that it was part of the uniform. He said it took him thirty years to understand Keynes's economics and just when he'd finally got the hang of it everyone started getting hooked on those new-fangled monetarist ideas.
Jim Hacker discovers the truth about bankers.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Strength of self-conviction

'You were convinced, and therefore convincing.'
Sir Humphrey Appleby's comment on Jim Hacker, MP, answering a parliament question without knowing the full truth.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Law of Inverse Relevance

'The less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it.'
- Jim Hacker, MP confesses about politicians' tactics.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Cerebral claustrophobia

The fight for free space – for wilderness and for public space – must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.

- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

The importance of exploring mindscapes

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…Time spent here is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated…
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Treadmills get you nowhere

The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog. Thus the body, a recreational rather than utilitarian entity doesn't work, but works out.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Walking is an indicator species

Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedoms and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Why revolutions are shortlived

It is the nature of revolutions to subside, which is not the same thing as to fail. A revolution is a lightning bolt showing us new possibilities and illumination the darkness of out old arrangements so that we will never see them the same way again.

- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Walking the talk…and talking the walk

…if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language…
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Traversing the mind

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back…Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

The mind at three miles an hour

I like walking because it's slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster that the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

The deficiency of efficiency

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free…the rhetoric of technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Life out of the box

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors – home, car, gym, office, shops – disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built against it.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

On walking

…Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing is a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust