Quotes About Bureaucracy

It's no coincidence that trust in government is at an all-time low now that the size of government is at an all-time high.

How can faceless bureaucrats in an intelligence agency deny brave soldiers a chance to tell the truth?

It's so hard to tell with him. He always looks like he's working the customer service desk at the DMV." "I always thought he looked like a postal worker who's about one write-up away from losing it completely.

While it cannot be denied that the state's enhanced role in the mid-twentieth century necessitated a larger bureaucracy, or that the officials of CORFO (for instance) served their country well, the suspicion remains that the expanded public administration was (to adapt the celebrated phrase about the British empire) in part a system of indoor relief for the Chilean middle class.

He charged me about £50 and in fifteen minutes I had a genuine Somali diplomatic passport, bearing my own name and photograph. No checks, no birth certificate, of course. I still have the passport, and it remains one of my strangest travel souvenirs.

In a colossal bureaucracy run like a nepotistic village, Stalin showed himself a master of personal politics.180 He was the patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification: he was right when he blasphemously declared in 1929 that 'the Party has made me in its own image'. He and the Party had

The idea of a rational bureaucracy, of skill, merit, and consistency, is essential to all modern states.

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious

Outside of traffic, there is nothing that has held this country back as much as committees.

He strode briskly away, to do whatever it was the managers did. Have meetings, I guess. Make phone calls. It was hard for us on the technical side to understand why the company required so many managers. Engineers built things. Salespeople sold things. Even Human Resources I could understand, kind of. But managers proliferated despite performing very few identifiable functions.

It's a lot easier to blow up trains than to make them run on time.

To even call them "units" is a joke. These were just mobs of men in uniforms, clerks

This is the lesson history told me: when a religion gets so mired in bureaucracy that compassion takes second place to the law, and the law is iron-bound and iron-clad and has no room in it for exceptions, then it's no longer a religion for humans, it's a religion for paper-pushers, painted saints, and marble statues.

You must love your neighbor as yourself, and you must love yourself as you love your God. Otherwise you get bureaucrats and swindlers and opinion polls and computer-generated graphs in place of helping the needy. Cold impersonal bureaucracies do not solve problems.

A gigantic, bloated government has to keep itself busy in order to justify its existence; hence, you have more regulations and meddling in the affairs of the people, whether they request it, need it, or not.

government-controlled programs continue to grow until they destroy themselves.

Hurry up and do nothing, that was the army's way of doing things.

Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action. I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead. Yet I think it the right government for Russia at this moment. If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky's characters should be governed, you will understand. Yet it is terrible.

We lived by very complex import and export policies, a very complex industrial licensing regime. Very few people could get licences, which were required right from manufacturing a pin to manufacturing a car, and generally went to people who found favour with the government.

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby DMV office to get my driver's permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. 'This is fake,' she whispered. 'Don't come back here again.'

The problem is that agencies sometimes lose sight of common sense as they create regulations.

The government can't even do a good job of something as simple as running the Post Office. How can it be expected to do a good job with something really important, like educating our children?

I don't know why anyone would prefer a more complicated tax code instead of a simpler one.