Quotes About Bureaucracy

Lacking a profit motive, workers in the government by and large have a different work ethic from those in private industry. When they could make one call, federal workers take a meeting. When they could find an answer on the Internet, they form a study committee. Instead of appointing one supervisor, they appoint five.

There's bipartisan efforts to change how FEMA works or, more importantly, change how relief funding trickles down to us down here.

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

The FBI and our entire government has become a bureaucracy. Sick, tired, and old as far as technology is concerned. This has to change.

One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Folks, this government isn't too big to fail, it's too big to succeed.

Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal.

The functionaries in the courtyard of the Palace threw open their wooden shutters and settled in for a long day of saying "fuck off in the name of the duke" to all comers.

The politics of death is bureaucracy, routine, rules, status quo. The politics of life is personal initiative, creativity, flair, dash, a little daring. The politics of death is calculation, prudence, measured gestures. The politics of life is experience, spontaneity, grace, directness. The politics of death is fear of youth. The politics of life is to trust the young to their own experiences.

To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.

By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers.

We're looking for stuff everyone agrees is a complete waste of time. Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate. It's been so long since somebody asked them to look backwards.

Getting a new passport took me a stupid amount of time. I had to go back five times with different photographs because they kept saying I was smiling, which is against the rules. I was not smiling.

It takes our government an awful lot of time to do most things competently, and that's part of the problem here.

Every time I ask for visa, they (USA) give me visa for five years. I have never had any problem in getting a visa to any nation.

congress - that great, benevolent asylum for the helpless

The first thing you want in a new country, is a patent office; then work up your school system; and after that, out with your paper.

El bibliotecario se mandó la parte corriendo de acá para allá cargado de libros, con todo el alboroto y el escándalo que les encanta a las autoridades insignificantes.

Medical care has become a lot of crust and precious little pie.

I am sick of meetings; cannot the man turn his head without he have a meeting?

The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.

The rest of us learned the simple lesson - invaluable in a bureaucratic society - that there is no moral or practical obligation to tell the truth when filling in forms.