Quotes About Bureaucracy

I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organizations devoted to decommissioning nuclear power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide.

Deception begins with bureaucracy," Palpatine said.

A bureaucracy is an agency that has power over us and therefore will use that power to advance its own self-interest. Bureaucrats have little or no incentive to serve the interests of the public as their compensation is received whether or not they do so and they lack the expertise to do so even if so inclined.

The power of citizens in a society is determined by their ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society.

But no one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.

The months subsequent were an endless dreary battle of paperwork, full of stalemates, fought in trenches.

I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.

So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

So the hours are pretty good then?" he resumed. The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths. "Yeah," he said, "but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

Ten million years, Earthman, can you conceive of that kind of time span? A galactic civilization could grow from a single worm five times over in that time. Gone." He paused. "Well, that's bureaucracy for you

You see, if I keep it up I can eventually get promoted to Senior Shouting Officer, and there aren't usually many vacancies for nonshouting and nonpushing-people-about officers, so I think I'd better stick to what I know.

But look, you found the notice, didn't you?" "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.

But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

who was arguing with a spokesman for the bulldozer drivers about whether or not Arthur Dent constituted a mental health hazard, and how much they should get paid if he did)

All this red tape and form-filling. That's what comes of a bureaucratic state. Can't go where you like and do as you please anymore! Somebody's always asking questions.

And a lot of fandangle it usually is," said Mrs. Burch. "Forms to fill in, and a lot of impertinent questions as shouldn't be asked of any decent body.

By comparison with them, among today's schoolteachers there are too many plain "salary-man" drudges. Or perhaps even more than salary men, there are too many bureaucrat types among those who become teachers. The kind of education these people dispense isn't worth a damn. There's absolutely nothing of interest in it. So it's no wonder that students today prefer to spend their time reading comic books.

Most of it meant nothing—the daily output of a grinding bureaucracy speaking to itself.

In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.

That's not the way the government works. You can't just take $1 billion from this program, $1 billion from over here, and then put it toward your pet project.

I worked on Capitol Hill for five years, and I saw how things work and how they do not. I saw the partisanship, the gridlock, the pettiness, and the corruption.

There is no doubt that there is a very strange phenomenon called the 'State Comptroller.'