A garland of quotations CII

Does anyone care about my Year in Books?

New systems, I fear, in states, are always dangerous, if not wicked.
•Fanny Burney, letter to Mrs Locke (1792).

As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.
•Franz Kafka to Gustav Janouch (ca. 1921).

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often and as much and in as many ways...