Time & Perspective Quote by Anna Louise Strong

Bureaucratic politeness has rarely sounded so final. Strong delivers a rejection dressed up as process: "very little hope" does the work of a closed door, while "any permission can be gained" shifts responsibility to an abstract system that no one quite controls. It is the grammar of institutions that want to remain humane without becoming accountable.

The sentence is engineered to pacify. The hedge ("very little") offers a sliver of possibility, enough to keep the applicant from escalating, while the passive construction ("can be gained") removes an actor who could be pressed, persuaded, or blamed. Then comes the ceremonial gesture: the "special folder". The word "special" is almost comic in its emptiness; it signals care while implying indefinite storage. Filing becomes a substitute for decision.

Strong, a journalist attuned to power, captures how gatekeeping often operates through time rather than argument. No policy is defended, no reasons are offered, no ideological line is stated. Instead, delay is the tactic, and "from time to time" is the soft promise that neutralizes urgency. The phrase "such people here as may have authority" finishes the evasion: authority is dispersed, conditional, and always somewhere else.

In context, this reads like a snapshot of how organizations-especially political or civic ones-are managed when they are inconvenient to those in charge. It is not a clash of principles; it is a slow administrative suffocation, the kind that lets power keep clean hands while nothing changes.