Quotes About Bureaucracy

It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.

After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs)

can't decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series

Crawling eldritch horrors don't get planning permission unless they're Trump's hairpiece.)

The iron law of bureaucracy dictates that most of the people in any large organization will, after a time, be more preoccupied with preserving their own jobs than with fulfilling the mission statement of the agency.

you've got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives.

This is a joke. Right?" I'm pointing at the green-screen terminal on the desk, and the huge dial-infested rotary phone beside it. "No sir." Bill clears his throat. "Unfortunately the NDO's office budget was misfiled years ago and nobody knows the correct code to requisition new supplies. At least it's warm in winter: you're right on top of the classified document incinerator room, and it's got the only chimney in the building.

as Plato and his pupil Aristotle understood, the building of empire, any empire, extinguishes democracy. Empire requires a centralized bureaucracy. Its complexity mandates a permanent caste of bureaucrats and military leaders who strip the citizenry of power.

Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never 'renovated,' only 'restored,' a distinction that escapes the babus.

Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.

We will downsize the government, motivate excess employees to become entrepreneurs, and increase the pay of a lean and mean bureaucracy.

States should be humble. Bureaucrats must recognise the limits of their knowledge. There is always a risk that the bird's eye view is so grand and sweeping as to induce delusions of omnipotence.

Every country in the world had a bureaucracy, whose entire purpose was to delay important things from happening.

The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.

A bureaucrat who said no to everything rarely got in trouble.

Efficiency was a concept foreign to most government agencies, not because there was anything wrong with the people, but because nobody had ever told them to do better.

The world is full of interiors that bleach the spirit. Hospitals, police stations, job centres, local government offices and prisons all have their own subtle type of vampire colour scheme and black-hole furnishing, capable by accident or design of wiping away a person's self-esteem and will to resist, like boiled-over soup off a ceramic hob.

Mordak has the mental clarity to recognise that when it comes to running a bureaucracy, Elves can achieve a degree of blinkered ruthlessness that makes goblins look like teddy-bears.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hell is not other people. Hell is the DMV.

You can change government and quasi-governmental agencies and systems from within about as successfully as you can tame a lion after it eats you, and any meaningful change from inside is usually ephemeral.

All official letters are written in such a language that the oracles of Delphi sound as examples of clear, outspoken, straightforward statements compared with them.

A civil servant is sometimes like a broken cannon - it won't work and you can't fire it.

A civil servant is sometimes like a broken cannon — it won't work and you can't fire it.