I will undoubtedly havetoseek what ishappily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office.

-Acheson, Dean Gooderham
  On resigning as Secretary of State to resume his career as a lawyer. In Time, 22 Dec.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.Great men are almost always bad men. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

-Acton of Aldenham
  Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3  Apr.

The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respirationöa troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now, if during this brief period,Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time.

-Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam
^9  Oliver Twist, ch.1.

   Ye servants of the Lord, Each in his office wait, Observant of the heavenly word, And watchful at his gate.

-Doddridge, Philip
Hymns,'Ye Servants of the Lord' (published1755).

This President will go down in historyas the only President who raised taxes before he tookoffice and cut spending after he left office.

-Dole, Bob (RobertJoseph)
  On Bill Clinton's retroactive tax increases and promises of future spending cuts. In the Los  Angeles Times,16 Feb.

Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by whichthey have once won office.

-Galbraith,John Kenneth
  The Affluent Society.

We are making politics a spectator sport in which our only duty is to vote somebody into office and then retire to the grandstands.

-Gergen, David Richmond
  In US News &  World Report,10 May.

When I was a lad I served a term As office boy to an attorney's firm. I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor, And I polished up the handle of the big front door. I polished up that handle so carefullee That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

-Gilbert, Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck)
  HMS Pinafore, act 2.

During my seven years in office,I was in love with seventeen million French women† I know this declaration will inspire irony and that English language readers will find it very French.

-Giscard d'Estaing,Vale¤  ry
  Le Pouvoir et la  vie.

Democracy is not a polite employer† The only way out of elective office is to get sick or die or get kicked out.

-Hoover, Herbert Clark
  The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, vol.2.

   Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

-Hume, David
  A  Treatise of Human Nature, bk.2, pt.3, section 3.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

-Huxley, Aldous Leonard
  Beyond the Mexique Bay.

High office teaches decision-making, not substance. It Klee consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered: they learn how to make decisions, but not what decisions to make.

-Kissinger, HenryAlfred
  The White HouseYears.

If the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,öif you did not come inonthewife'sside,öif youdid not sneak intothehouse in her train, but were an old friend in first habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,ölook about you† Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world.

-Lamb, Charles
  Essays of Elia,'A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People'.

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetryand tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

-Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair
  Babbitt, ch.3.

The news of the dayas it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper isinall literalnessthebibleofdemocracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.

-Lippmann,Walter
  Liberty and the News,'What Modern Liberty Means'.

Every time that I fill a high office, I make one hundred men discontented and one ungrateful.

-Louis XIV knownas the Great or leRoiSoleil [theSunKing]
c.1669   After the disgrace of the Duke of Lauzun. Quoted in Voltaire Le Sie'  cle de Louis XI V (1751), ch.26.

He is a man who sits in the outer office of the White House hoping to hear the President sneeze.

-Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis)
Of the Vice-President. Recalled on his death, 29  Jan1956.

In our system, at about11.30pm on election night, they just push you off the edge of the clifföand that's it.You might scream on the way down, but you're going to hit the bottom, and you're not going to be in office.

-Mondale,Walter F(rederick)
  On losing to Ronald Reagan in the presidential elections, in the NewYork Times, 4 Mar.

By office boys for office boys.

-Marquis of
Of the Daily Mail.The phrase recallsThackeray's Pendennis who started a newspaper 'by gentlemen for gentlemen'. Quoted in S J Taylor The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail (1966), ch.2.