Quotes About Bureaucracy

ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency.

The goal of an end to poverty is so noble that governments have successfully used the end to justify the means. The means have been high taxation of the productive members of society and arrays of bureaucracies that increasingly regulate the lives of us all. 1

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof they were busy.

The big problem was the typing. When you run up against a policeman at a typewriter, you might as well get a Coke and relax.

you were being strangled by the biggest, most inefficient, best entrenched bureaucratic system in the history of the world. You were in school, adrift within an education system that had lost any interest in the value of knowledge, or truth, or discipline, or self-evaluation. Like all monopolies, it was more interested in perpetuating and protecting its own territory than in anything else.

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do it in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.

Perhaps, like bureaucracies everywhere, government officials in Singapore are uncomfortable with groups who appeal successfully to the public's sense of idealism, and whose work cannot be easily quantified in economic terms. Officials can handle individuals and organisations who are in it for the money, but seem not to know how to deal with people who seek and promote more intangible and selfless rewards.

Government employees are the lowest risk-takers on earth.

Did you ever notice: when you put the two words "The" and "IRS" together, it spells "THEIRS"?

Back then, government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights

A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

Government just cannot govern well without reliable independent reporting and criticism. No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting; the cleverest agents of the secret police state are inferior to the plodding reporter of the democracy.

The larger the  government,  the  less  efficient  and  productive  is  the  economy.  Slaves  don't produce with the enthusiasm, incentive, and imagination that free people do. Bureaucratic programs just don't work as intended.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

The state's authority would come from one of three sources: tradition, bureaucracy, or charisma.

One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.

The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted -- or rather tend to be corrupted -- by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

Few Americans—or members of Congress—read The Public Interest. Still, the rapid rise of the neo-cons to intellectual respectability was revealing. And their complaints, especially about the dead hand of bureaucracy, epitomized a new mood of doubt.

The real jungle is in the office of the bureaucrats