Functionary Quotes

There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function. (Georges Clemenceau)

A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.

Paul Johnson

As you know, I am not a writer but a Party functionary. But like every Communist I consider myself to have been mobilized by Party propaganda and deem it my duty to participate actively in the work of our press.

Leonid Brezhnev

Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.

Ambrose Bierce

When I spoke about Bond with Fleming, he said that when the character was conceived, Bond was a very simple, straightforward, blunt instrument of the police force, a functionary who would carry out his job rather doggedly. But he also had a lot of idiosyncrasies that were considered snobbish -- such as a taste for special wines, et cetera. But if you take Bond in the situations that he is constantly involved with, you see that it is a very hard, high, unusual league that he plays in. Therefore he is quite right in having all his senses satisfied -- be it sex, wine, food or clothes -- because the job, and he with it, may terminate at any minute. But the virtues that Amis mentions -- loyalty, honesty -- are there, too.

Sean Connery

And thus Christianity is played in "Christendom.” Artists in dramatic costumes make their appearance in artistic buildings- there really is no danger at all, anything but that: the teacher is a royal functionary, steadily promoted, making a career- and how he dramatically plays Christianity, in short, he plays comedy. He lectures about renunciation, but he himself is being steadily promoted; he teaches all that about despising worldly titles and rank, but he himself is making a career.

Søren Kierkegaard

There is a kind of thinking in the Church that wants to reduce the priest to a mere functionary, a managing director, where administration rather than doctrine and worship are to determine the form of the Church.

Arthur Middleton

I grew up middle class. My father was a public functionary who didn't leave an inheritance, just debts.

Sebastian Pinera

The idea of the saint is the exact opposite of the priest in service of the Holy. The priest is a functionary of the Holy;' there is no Holy without its officials, without the bureaucratic machinery supporting it, organizing its ritual, from the Aztecs' official of human sacrifice to the modern sacred state or army rituals. The saint on the contrary, occupies the object petit a, of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. He... enacts no ritual, he conjures nothing, he just persists in his inert presence.

Slavoj Žižek

LICKSPITTLE, n. A useful functionary, not infrequently found editing a newspaper ... the lickspittle is only the blackmailer under another aspect, although the latter is frequently found as an independent species.

Ambrose Bierce

My ambition was to liquidate communism, the dictatorship over all the people. Supporting me and urging me on in this mission was my wife, who was of this opinion long before I was. I knew that I could only do this if I was the leading functionary. In this my wife urged me to climb to the top post. While I actually became acquainted with the West, my mind was made up forever. I decided that I must destroy the whole apparatus of the CPSU and the USSR. Also, I must do this in all of the other socialist countries. My ideal is the path of social democracy. Only this system shall benefit all the people. This quest I decided I must fulfil. (Mikhail Gorbachev)

The "requirements," indeed, force the teacher - and administrator - into the role of an authoritarian functionary whose primary task becomes that of enforcing the requirements rather than helping the learner to learn.

Neil Postman