Why Bureaucracy Persists - The Threat to Liberty and Freedom

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville
[Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian
Source: Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Alexis.de.Tocqueville.Quote.B135


"It used to be the boast of free men that,
so long as they kept within
the bounds of the known law,
there was no need to
ask anybody's permission
or to obey anybody's orders.
It is doubtful whether any of us
can make this claim today."

-- Friedrich August von Hayek
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 208
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Friedrich.August.von.Hayek.Quote.651C