Quotes About Bureaucracy

The White House is a huge organization, first and foremost.

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

The U.N. is capable of endless process and mindless psychobabble, but as far as getting the job done on the ground, I just don't see them doing it.

Government likes committees... a lot. Committees kill all the really good ideas and generally all the really bad ideas. They produce middle-ground mush.

I don't like producing. It's a lot of meetings you sit through that amount to nothing.

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

I thought I was going to go into politics, but that became disheartening. You see that a lot of stuff doesn't get done, people walk around all self-important, and it's just depressing.

Corrupt bureaucrats and cops ought to dismissed or compulsorily retired from service, as they are a drain on the service. Their performance must be vigorously assessed.

One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.

The United States has so many laws, into the millions, that experts have lost track of just how many laws we have.

It's the FSA and its plethora of EU bodies that's failed.

The best way to avoid bureaucracy is to have small teams who are empowered to make decisions and get their work done.

Best thing for a government to do is to eliminate obstacles like filing registrations, getting licences, and so on... tedious steps slow everything down.

Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which will put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill.

The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits - I wasn't. The system gives you bad grades and tells you you're stupid. You don't think, 'If this kid's not a good fit, it could be the system's fault.'

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

The federal government operates pretty much in line with the quip, "If it moves, tax it; if you can't tax it, control it; if you can't control it, give it a million dollars.

But the conventional practice, particularly in a large foundation, is to delegate administration to a hierarchical staff structure, much as a business board would do it. And when bureaucratic inertia takes over, as it does—in time—in all institutions that are so structured, the usual remedy is to install a new top administrator who will build some new life into it.

innovation is discouraged in most bureaucracies

What's bureaucracy?" I asked, finally getting a word in edgewise. "Red tape . . . the system, " Aahz informed me. "The organization to get things done that keeps things from getting done.

Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.

Liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn't any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do. Rather it's conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority.

When society is organised from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society, too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.