Quotes About Bureaucracy

As a friend often said, India is a gymkhana club, where the people have the votes, but the politicians and the bureaucrats have the membership.

Bureaucratic advancement means fewer peers, more span of control, generally an increasing information-pump function, and increased distance from the actual implementation of whatever it is the organization does.

You go to Paris, or you go to Portugal, you go to Poland, and you ask, 'Who are you people?' They'll tell you, we're Portuguese, we're Spanish, we're Polish. Who are the people that are really European? The people in Brussels, in the E.U. bureaucracy. Europe has not been able to move to the level of patriotic identification with the concept.

Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.

The government should urgently speed its adoption of AI to reduce the amount of time individuals spend unnecessarily interacting with the government and increase the speed of government response to citizens.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

Jindal's record in Louisiana is controversial, in part because, in a state which has historically favored patronage culture and a bureaucracy that offered uninterrupted employment for those who backed the right horse, he aimed to destroy the old spoils system.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks

Committee - a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours.

I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.

That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating shit.

My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to

that's how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing or why.

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.

Cops sit on their asses and flip through their folders. Feds sit on their derrières and peruse their dossiers.

The word "personnel" may seem superfluous, but Army regulations prohibit brevity and common sense.

They're from the government and they're there to help you.

Each administration that he'd served had started out with its own unique style, its own vision, energy, optimism, and idealism. But within a year, the entrenched bureaucracy reexerted its suffocating influence, and about a year after that, the new administration began getting pessimistic, isolated, and divided with internal conflicts and squabbles.

They're from the government, and they're here to help

The Feds, you have to understand, are so very politically correct and anal retentive, so very fucking frightened of the Washington Thought Police. They're totally cowed by the stupid directives that come out of Washington like a steady stream of diarrhea.

The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed

Protection Certificate) to open a lemonade stand in New York City?

In the Philippines, formalizing home ownership was until recently a 168-step process involving fifty-three public and private agencies and taking between thirteen and twenty-five years.