Institutional Flaws Quotes

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

Congress does two things well: nothing and overreacting.

The faults of advertising are only those common to all human institutions. If advertising speaks to a thousand in order to influence one, so does the church. And if it encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony. Good times, bad times, there will always be advertising. In good times, people want to advertise; in bad times they have to.

Too often [the Church] is weighted down and burdened with the sins and failings of her children; too often she appears disfigured and discouraged.

I'm a deeply broken person, and broken institutions fascinate me.

If mankind were to resolve to agree in no institution of government, until every part of it had been adjusted to the most exact standard of perfection, society would soon become a general scene of anarchy, and the world a desert.

Like every other industry or institution, the journalism world is populated by the petty and fearful, in addition to the courageous and brilliant.

There's nobody who doesn't have problems with the church, because there's sin in the church. But there's no other place to be a Christian except the church.

I've always felt there was something wrong with Wells Fargo's culture, for a very, very long time.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.

But churches always have been the leading cause of the need for churches.

The system isn't stupid, but the people in it are.

Institutions are created to address human frailties and human failures to meet human needs, but unfortunately, institutions are staffed by humans, so more institutions are created to address the failures of the original institutions.

By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind.

Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption

The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system.

There are good, humanitarian people everywhere - occasionally even in the Church.

The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.

The fact that, with time, this League [of Nations]-which was presumably designed by its founders to exist for all eternity-cannot be coupled with a Treaty the short term of which is inherent in its own weaknesses and impracticabilities, is a point which can perhaps be contested by today's interested parties, but which will one day be deemed a matter of course in history.

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.

Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

Things happened there that I don't think are the finest hours for anybody, whether it was a journalist, the legal system or, in that case of the political system, who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best.