C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Office
Office without pay makes thieves.
The gratitude of place-expectants is a lively sense of future favors.
Some few have a natural talent for office-holding; very many for office-seeking.
The office should seek the man, not man the office.
When impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.
When a king creates an office, Providence creates immediately a fool to buy it.
High office is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit—reptiles and eagles.
Every fresh appointment I make produces for me one cool friend and one hundred earnest enemies.
It is the curse of service; preferment goes by letter and affection, not by the old gradation where each second stood heir to the first.
Five things are requisite to a good officer—ability, clean hands, despatch, patience, and impartiality.
If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none.
All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external happiness of elevated office.
Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?***And the creature run from the cur? There thou might’st behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.
He who performs his duty in a station of great power must needs incur the utter enmity of many, and the high displeasures of more.
If ever this free people, if this government itself is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this human wriggle and struggle for office—that is, a way to live without work.
Office of itself does much to equalize politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.