Quotes About Bureaucracy

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with - or protect - the privacy of their exchange.

The only way to make me stand in line for half an hour to buy a spool of thread, or to make me spend six weeks in getting stamps on paper when I want to drive a car, is to use the energy of persons who otherwise would be making more thread and more cars.

The second building was enormous. Its central corridor looked long enough to stage a hundred-yard-dash in. I contemplated making one. Ever since the Army, big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck-passing, hurry up and wait. Only now and then you met a man with enough gumption to keep the big machine from bogging down of its own weight.

In Russia the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole people.

In other countries, the bureaucracy serves the needs of the people and the state; here, the bureaucracy itself is primary, and it takes precedence over the needs of the people and the state.

But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

Between 1890 and 1911 there was a 200 percent increase in the numbers of bureaucrats, most of them new appointments. In Austria alone there were 3 million civil servants for a total population of some 28 million. Even

One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don't get as much government as we pay for.

Haven't you noticed that every time the government f-ks up McDonald's has a new sandwich?

Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.

The Declaration of Independence is so lucid were afraid of it today. It scares the hell out of every modern bureaucrat, because it tells them there comes a time when we must stop taking orders.

By the time the civil service has finished drafting a document to give effect to the principle, there may be little of the principle left.

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.

I landed a job as a clerk-typist at a huge engineering and construction firm in the city, in the nuclear quality-assurance department, where I labored under a tsunami wave of triplicate forms and memos. It was very upsetting. It was also so boring that it made my eyes feel ringed with dark circles, like Lurch. I finally figured out that most of this paperwork could be tossed without there being any real … well … fallout, and this freed me up to write short stories instead.

Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don't like great teachers. They're organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average. Why

The problem is that most schools don't like great teachers. They're organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average.

The problem doesn't lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead. Here

I have touched upon how well compensated British bureaucrats in India were, but what made things worse was how imbalanced their salaries were when compared with their local counterparts. In the first decades of the twentieth century, J. T. Sunderland observed that the difference in salaries and emoluments was so great that 8,000 British officers earned £13,930,554, while 130,000 Indians in government service were collectively paid a total of £3,284,163.

Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was 'neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service'.

It's a really, really hard life when you don't have a document that actually gives you a name and a face.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

Law Number L: The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as a chimpanzee's and one-tenth as long as a human's, but four times as long as the official's who created it.

The closest thing to eternal life on earth is a Government Program