Top 15 Leonard D. White Quotes

Whenever we [public officials] make a mistake, some-one jumps on us for it, but whenever we do something well nobody pays any attention to us. We never get any recognition except when we get ‘bawled out’.

You cannot give an official power to do right without at the same time giving him power to do wrong.

Few of the major tasks of modern administration can be carried out without the constant support of the technician.

More and more clearly it is being understood that the promise of American life will never be realized until American administration has been lifted out of the ruts in which it has been left by a century of neglect.

The role of administration in the modern state is profoundly affected by the general political and cultural environment of the age.

To conduct of government business... [is similar to the] conduct of the affairs of any other social organization, commercial, philanthropic, religious, or educational, in all of which good management is recognized as an element essential to success.

Public administration is the management of men and materials in the accomplishment of the purposes of the state.

[ Public administration is merely] a special case of the larger category, administration, a process which is common to all organized human effort and which is highly developed in modern corporate business, in the church, in the Red Cross, in education, and in international bodies, public and private.

The objective of public administration is the most efficient utilization of the resources at the disposal of officials and employees.

Defined in broadest terms, public administration consists of all those operations having for their purpose the fulfillment or enforcement of public policy. This definition covers a multitude of particular operations in many fields — the delivery of a letter, the sale of public land, the negotiation of a treaty, the award of compensation to an injured workman, the quarantine of a sick child, the removal of litter from a park, manufacturing plutonium, and licensing the use of atomic energy. It includes military as well as civil affairs, much of the work of courts, and all the special fields of government activity— police, education, health, construction of public works, conservation, social security, and many others.

One foundation for the future of American democracy is a sound administrative system, able to discharge with competence and integrity the tasks laid upon it by the people. The present system is far in advance of that which sufficed in 1925, but its improvement has no more than kept pace with the added responsibilities heaped upon it.

As a nation we are, however, slowly accepting the fact that the loose-jointed, easy-going, somewhat irresponsible system of administration which we carried over from our rural, agricultural background is no longer adequate for present and future needs.

The book rest upon four assumptions. It assumes that administration is a - single process, substantially uniform in its essential characteristics whether observed and therefore avoids the study of municipal administration, state administration, or federal administration as such. It is assumed that the study of administration should start from the base of management rather than the foundation of law, and is therefore more absorbed in the affairs of the American Management Association than in the decisions of the courts. It assumes that administration is still primarily an art but attaches importance to the significant tendency to transform it into a science. It assumes that administration has become, and will continue to be, the heart of the problem of modern government.

Curiously enough, commentators on American political institutions have never produced a systematic analysis of our administrative system except from the point of view of the lawyer. Until the last few years even the text books have obstinately closed their eyes to this enormous terrain, studded with governmental problems of first magnitude and fascinating interest; and even today they dismiss the subject with a casual chapter. But certainly no one pretends that administration can still be put aside “as a practical detail which clerks could arrange after doctors had agreed upon principles."

* John M. Gaus, Leonard Dupee White, and Marshall E. Dimock. Frontiers of public administration. (1936).