Quotes About Bureaucracy

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

My experience in government is that when things are non-controversial and beautifully coordinated, there is not much going on

Wat een gezeur op die formulieren, hè? Maar ik moet doen alsof ik het hardop voorlees. Enzovoort, enzovoort. - Crowley

Tunny should still have been unbreakable, but like Enigma it was made vulnerable by the carelessness of its operators and the bureaucratic nature of their system.

you can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.

headquarters-bureaucrat vice presidents who are nonproducing but positioned to take the blame for those above them if anything goes wrong;

He had hours of paperwork ahead of him. All this paper would one day be the downfall of the Empire.

Con tanta normalidad, quiero decir. Siempre pensé que iba acompañado de pasiones o arrebatos. Lo de antes fue un acto casi burocrático.

Prat de la Riba: Dos Españas: la periférica, viva, dinámica, progresiva, y la central, burocrática, adormecida, yerma. La primera es la viva, la segunda la oficial.

What came in the wake of 1971 promised to be an endless trial by fire for the constituent units of a Pakistani federation that the military in league with the central bureaucracy insisted on governing as a quasi- unitary state.

In the absence of democratic politics, the dominance of a predominantly Punjabi civil bureaucracy and army heightened the grievances of non-Punjabi provinces and the linguistic groups within them. Te entrenched institutional supremacy of a Punjabi army and federal bureaucracy, not Punjab's dominance over other provinces per se, had emerged as the principal impediment to restoring democratic processes in Pakistan.

Foreshadowing a decisive shift in the balance of power from elected to nonelected institutions, a mentally and physically unfit Ghulam Mohammed mocked parliamentary practice by appointing a "cabinet of talents" that included General Ayub Khan as defense minister and Iskander Mirza as interior minister with the doyen of the civil bureaucracy, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali, retaining the all- important finance portfolio

She learned from the passport office that she would need her husband's permission in order to leave the country with the baby, and her father's permission to leave at all. To stem the flow of young Tunisians to Syria, the government had started imposing often arbitrary travel restrictions on citizens under thirty-five. The cost of the journey, the air tickets alone, amounted to more than she had.

it would have been a rare thing anyhow for an official to come upon an idea that is not provided for in the regulations.

The defects of bureaucracy are, indeed, well known. It is a form of Government which has been tried often enough in the world, and it is easy to show what, human nature being what it in the long run is, the defects of a bureaucracy must in the long run be.

When those of us in the words-making world use the term 'overregulation,' we are mostly putting a name to a concept we rarely experience consciously.

I have missed meetings because a Speed Post from a government office reached after the meeting. But these are rare blips in a large network.

The real problem is clean up the bureaucracy that people have to deal with to become a citizen the right way. And we must truly secure the border. We can't leave it porous.

In Washington, D.C., they don't do real work.

The actual teaching itself becomes lost in a sea of paperwork and teachers soon realise that the very reason they entered this profession constitutes only a fraction of their working day.

I realised how much the system did not want to change.

Legislative language is governed by a law of etymology that is also the ancient code of the bureaucracy: It doesn't have to be right, it just has to be close enough for government work. If they understand what you mean, it doesn't matter what you say or how you say it.