Commissioner Quotes
In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. [...] One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.
Chinua Achebe
I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill (...) I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years... Just put them there and say: 'Sir,' –or 'madam,'– 'will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organisation of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself.'
George Bernard Shaw
I was stunned to learn that there are CIA operatives inside some state governments. They are not in executive positions-in other words, not appointed by the governor-but are permanent state employees. Governors come and go, but they keep working-in legitimate jobs, but with dual identities. In Minnesota, this person was at a deputy commissioner level, fairly high up. [...] Are they put there to spy? To see the direction that state government is going, what's happening, and report back-to whom? And for what purpose? Do they think there are traitors in certain states? I don't know. That part, I wasn't told. I'm left to wonder why our Constitution is being violated.
Jesse Ventura
On August 8, 1944, when Himmler appointed SS General Kammler Commissioner General for the A-4 program, it looked as though the struggle for control had come to an end. I felt like a man who has devoted years of toil and affection to making a superb violin, a masterpiece which needs only tuning, and who then has to look on helplessly while the instrument is grabbed by a tough, unmusical woodman and scraped with a jagged lump of wood.
Walter Dornberger
I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice... Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.
Thomas Szasz
Everyone who has seen the recent news reports has been shocked and moved by the suffering children in Sarajevo. At the end of last week, we told the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that we stood ready to evacuate children from Sarajevo to the United Kingdom for medical treatment, or to send medical teams to Yugoslavia to provide treatment on the spot.If it is possible to treat the children on the spot, near to their families, with people around them who speak their language and in relatively familiar surroundings, that is obviously the best way. We have told the International Red Cross that we are willing to fly out medical personnel at very short notice if needed. I hope to meet the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in London later this week to see what further action is needed.
John Major
As graduation neared, neither my classmates nor I could know, of course, that World War II was in the offing. It was destined to expose us to trying and often tragic events. My roommate, Billy Hulse, a flier, disappeared on a training mission over the Great Lakes, his body never recovered. A close friend, Frank Oliver, died in the fighting in Normandy soon after the invasion. Buist Dowling killed in Normandy while leading a patrol. One of the better football players, Jock Clifford, killed as a regimental commander on Okinawa. Bill Priestly, aide to the high commissioner of the Philippines, electing to stay when the fighting started on the islands, also killed. Those and more.
William Westmoreland
