Quotes About Bureaucracy

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

I'm a statistic in a system that a civil servant dominates.

I think there needs to be a meeting to set an agenda for more meetings about meetings.

When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.

You wonder sometimes how our government puts on its pants in the morning.

Only two things ever stop the government from doing anything: money and politics

Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.

It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.

Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.

Just be glad you're not getting all the government you're paying for

Thank God we don't get all the government we pay for.

To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you've been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.

The bureaucrat has become a self-styled sacred person; and the common man is blocked from finding out what the bureaucrats are doing, let alone controlling them.

The bureaucracy, once noted for its efficiency and its adherence to the policy of merit-based promotion, became infused with nepotism, and the buying and selling of offices was a common practice.

Justice William 0. Douglas once told President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Any government bureau more than ten years old should be abolished, because after that it becomes more concerned with its image than with its mission.

People must therefore get away from the idea that serious work is restricted to beating to death a well-defined problem in a narrow discipline, while broadly integrative thinking is relegated to cocktail parties. In academic life, in bureaucracies, and elsewhere, the task of integration is insufficiently respected.

it is true that the recession has been made much worse by Downing Street since the Coalition took office. But what was actually needed was not Labour's cherished solution to every problem - more borrowing and spending that we couldn't afford. Instead there should have been a rapid transfer of money from unproductive areas, like pointless bureaucracy, into job-creating activities such as house and road building.

All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.

What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

I am using the term "box tickers" to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.

The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.

The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see only 2 percent of what's in front of them.

What "the public," "the workforce," "the electorate," "consumers," and "the population" all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating.