Quotes About Bureaucracy

Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets.

What I have never been able to tolerate is the prospect that my few years on earth will be frittered away filling out the form to verify that I filled out the previous form, or worse, toiling in the service of some enterprise that perpetuates the things I hate: war, corporate bullying, bureaucratic hoop-jumping, plunder of nature, and more hours tethered to electronic screens. I was willing to work, but I wanted my work to matter—to repair land and cities, to cultivate peace and justice.

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, 'Well, what do you need?'

Sweetie, this is Hell. We invented paperwork.

Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Britain has invented a new missile. It's called the civil servant - it doesn't work and it can't be fired.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

Bureaus are extrusions from the body politic - they are pus

The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food.

Elaine (de Kooning) wrote, "For the bureaucrat, reality is found in . . .the radio with the advertisements that make claims that he accepts a s false. Reality is the baseball game, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. Reality is conspicuous consumption. All of this in short, is the reality that someone else has made for him. This to the artist is unreality . . .

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

We still have real jury trials, honest judges, and free elections, all the superficial characteristics of a functional, free democracy. But underneath that surface is a florid and malevolent bureaucracy that mostly (not absolutely, but mostly) keeps the rich and the poor separate through thousands of tiny, scarcely visible inequities.

intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.

The epic struggle to pass health care reform was at once a shameless betrayal of the public trust of historic proportions and proof that a nation that perceives itself as being divided into red and blue should start paying attention to a third color that rules the day in Washington—a sort of puke-colored politics that puts together deals like this one and succeeds largely through its mastery of the capital city's bureaucracy.

After Clinton, just to get food stamps to buy potatoes and flour, you suddenly had to hand in a detailed financial history dating back years, submit to wholesale invasions of privacy, and give in to a range of humiliating conditions. Meanwhile banks in the 1990s were increasingly encouraged to lend and speculate without filling out any paperwork at all, and eventually borrowers were freed of the burden of even having to show proof of income when

This was not uncommon in government-run operations, where a request that someone do their job often induced a catatonic state that might last anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour.

Tax complexity itself is a kind of tax.

Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized', the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.