Quotes About Bureaucracy

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. Self-organization

Politicians take money from the citizenry, funnel much of it to themselves and their friends, and then use the rest of it to buy votes and to grow their power—which involves bigger and bigger government. Once a bureau is created it is never destroyed—like a malignant cancer. And government never invents the next great computer. Never produces. Only consumes." Alyssa

politics are the curse of the Navy!

Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.

Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.

The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

The gargantuan, ever-growing, ever-less-accountable, impossible-to-uproot federal bureaucracy is actually the sleeper issue of our time. It's at the heart of the conservative critique of modern government: faceless bureaucrats writing incomprehensible regulations that complicate our lives for no good reason.

State legislative and administrative bodies are not field offices of the national bureaucracy," she wrote. A quarter century later, her view was generally that of the majority.

Stalin's policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies. These modern-day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced.

The jangling, dissonant sound of modern politics; the anger on cable television and the evening news; the fast pace of social media; the headlines that clash with one another when we scroll through them; the dullness, by contrast, of the bureaucracy and the courts; all of this

Corporate anthropologist Karen Stephenson argues that though trust is the natural glue of human connection since prehistoric times, it is mostly absent in modern hierarchies—especially in government, where vertical silos compete with and undermine one another, often within the same bureaucracy.

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

The government would be making decisions about what type of care is given, what procedures can be performed, and the kind of medications prescribed. It would be a very profound change from the ideal to which we aspire.

Changing the world in a profound and beneficial way is not enough to put a dint in bureaucracies which operate on their own dynamics.

One of the hardest areas is duplication; everyone knows there's lots of duplication in government. But when you ask someone, 'OK, name two programs that are duplicative,' typically there's a long pause.

I remember the moon landings, and Apollo was the paradigm by which all progress was measured at that time. And I knew that creating a true space-faring civilization was both possible and practical. What I failed to realize was that the effort would fail due to bureaucratic inertia and political apathy.

We have the finest officers in the world, but it seems like once they become generals it is a self-licking ice cream cone of who gets promoted and who gets approved to join that club. No one thinks outside the box.

America has become what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy.

I think there is a lot of fat in the government.

The federal government is way larger than it should be.

You've got the federal government in every part of our lives, doing things wrong.

As far as cutting jobs, you could cut whole agencies out of the federal government and not miss them.