Quotes About Bureaucracy

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.

The first law of bureaucracy is to guarantee its own continuance.

As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse.

So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly—like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who's more religious would you say—the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?

Trevor wondered if anyone in the outside world could even guess at the horror of working in the Planning Department

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

I heard the Empire has a tyrannical and repressive government! What form of government is that? said Ponder Stibbons. A tautology, said the Dean, from above.

The clerk] held in front of him a scroll with a red wax seal affixed, the kind of thing believed to make a document official - or at least expensive and difficult to understand, which, in fact, amounts to the same thing.

It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

the result will be the expansion of government.

All government is an ugly necessity.

I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.

Inefficiency is to be our safeguard against despotism.

over open country you could send a spastic out of a plane with a beach umbrella and the Government couldn't care less.

In a survey we conducted for Harvard Business Review, 63 percent of respondents listed the reluctance of leaders to surrender power as a significant barrier to reducing bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, the premise that employees are incapable of exercising judgment tends to be self-validating. First, jobs stripped of interesting cognitive work are unlikely to attract individuals looking to exercise their problem-solving skills. Second, overly scripted jobs give employees little opportunity to disprove the bureaucratic hypothesis that acumen correlates with rank. And third, after living for a few months in a reign of rules, most employees will quit or mentally check out.

That's the paradox of change in a bureaucracy: what seems doable isn't transformational and what's transformational doesn't seem doable. The result: an endless succession of tweaks that never succeed in making the organization fundamentally more capable.

With every crisis, authority moves to the center, and stays there. And as bureaucracy grows stronger, those who might resist it grow weaker.

Throughout the long history of social progress, the most powerful argument for change has been the assertion that every human being deserves the fullest possible opportunity to develop, apply, and benefit from their natural gifts, and that unnecessary human-made impediments to this quest are unjust. That is why we stand against bureaucracy: because human beings deserve better.