Like most colonies, Zaïre had impose on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer… — Douglas Adams
Like most colonies, Zaïre had impose on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upward to its colonial masters. Local officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them from being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do but trip itself up, bump into things, and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.
p. 65Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
[On the kakapo’s tendency to freeze in confusion when faced with a predator:] It’s frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo, which is a little twitchier than its contemporaries, till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of them could say, “When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like hell.” On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
p. 116
I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
p. 38
I was feeling pretty raw about my own species because we presume to draw a distinction between what we call good and what we call evil. We find our images of what we call evil in things outside ourselves, in creatures that know nothing of such matters, so that we can feel revolted by them, and, by contrast, good about ourselves.
p. 48
