Life & Wisdom Quote by George Woodcock

Bureaucracy always believes it is being reasonable, which is precisely why Woodcock's little revolt lands with such force. The line stages a clash between two value systems: the managerial faith that every human motive can be processed by committee, and the writer's insistence that certain desires are illegible to institutional logic. "A council that consisted almost entirely of scientists" isn't a swipe at science so much as a portrait of a technocratic temperament: procedural, credentialed, confident that what can't be quantified doesn't quite count. His "reasons" for wanting to leave - implied to be personal, creative, political, or simply existential - are treated as an error message.

The subtext is less "I wanted time off" than "I refuse to translate my life into their categories". Unpaid leave is already the compromise option: he isn't asking to be subsidized, only unshackled. The denial, then, reads as pure control. By repeating their refusal ("no, no unpaid"), Woodcock mimics the petty finality of administrative speech, that infantilizing cadence institutions use when they are protecting policy from personhood.

The punchline is the cleanest possible act of self-definition: "So I immediately resigned". It's a sentence structured like a trapdoor. No pleading, no escalation, no appeal. Just exit. In a mid-century world increasingly organized around expert panels and rational planning, Woodcock - an anarchist-leaning intellectual in both politics and temperament - treats autonomy as non-negotiable. The move isn't reckless; it's an editorial correction. If a system can't accommodate a human reason, he won't donate his life to it.