Quotes & Sayings About Bureaucracy

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire. — Adolf Hitler

The most natural action of a senior official is to breed junior officials. — Jason Jennings

A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers. — Joe Haldeman

Publicly, we're saying we're better at fighting terrorism. Privately, we know that the bureaucracy has only gotten worse, since the high-level people are scared of being held responsible for 9/11. — David Hunt

I've been in the government bureaucracy, I've practiced law, I've done a lot of different things. — John Bolton

Defense leaders should be searching for ways to reform out-of-date procurement processes, to collapse layers of Pentagon bureaucracy, and to restrain the growth in personnel and benefits costs. A critical first step in that process should be to conduct a full Pentagon audit to determine how DOD spends taxpayer dollars. — Pete Hegseth

Quote of the day:Quote of the day: A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley — Aldous Huxley

The Sangh Parivar, against which I had been waging a war, misled the people. My opponents used the Election Commission and the bureaucracy to win a political battle. — Lalu Prasad Yadav

I think the U.K. would be perfectly successful as a standalone country, part of the European marketplace like Norway and Switzerland but without the expensive E.U. bureaucracy. — Jim Ratcliffe

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules. — Michel Foucault

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need. — Christopher Bond

Citizens everywhere, and especially soldiers, should remember that entrenched bureaucracy, whatever the level, can be overcome. You've got to stick to it, be polite but firm, and just not take no for an answer. — William G. Bainbridge

Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it's that patterns are repeated. — Frank Herbert

The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them - and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right. If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn't have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you? — Thomas Sowell

The public sector can only feed off the private sector; it necessarily lives parasitically upon the private economy. But this means that the productive resources of society - far from satisfying the wants of consumers - are now directed, by compulsion, away from these wants and needs. The consumers are deliberately thwarted, and the resources of the economy diverted from them to those activities desire by the parasitic bureaucracy and politicians. — Murray Rothbard

We . . . go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting. — G.M. Young

Up or out greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job. — James Fallows

What comes after the revolution is inevitably bureaucracy. Whoever wins the revolution builds a bureaucracy. — Sean Parker

I'm more depressed about the realities of the mature bureaucracy and more excited about the ideal that we're fighting for. And the juxtaposition has obvious consequences. Rolf Mowatt-Larrsen — Ron Suskind

The minute you're working with the government, you're dealing with bureaucracy, you're dealing with time lags, you're dealing with rigidity, you're dealing with a slow pace. — Bob Simon

But this does not detract from the wisdom of his faith in the people and his constant insistence that they be left to manage their own affairs. His opposition to bureaucracy will bear careful analysis, and the country could stand a great deal more of its application. The trouble with us is that we talk about Jefferson but do not follow him. In his theory that the people should manage their government, and not be managed by it, he was everlastingly right. — Calvin Coolidge

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks. — Hortense Calisher

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

We say that word [bureaucracy] with such contempt. But it's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that's working against us. — Jennifer Pahlka

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

The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy. The — Yuval Noah Harari

N terms of the logistics of that from a title perspective, we have not talked about that nor do we typically care very much. We're not large on bureaucracy. My brothers and I said to each other when we started in this business that as a collective we can do far more than any one of us can do individually. And that's really what guides our relationship - this sense of camaraderie. And it is a family business, and we work together collaboratively as a family. — Ivanka Trump

Communism is what happens when atheism meets bureaucracy. — Theodore Beale

... it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists, and entrepreneurs alike. — Steven Johnson

For all the scientific evidence we were amassing, many people, both in government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening.
I wasn't the only voice screaming in the wilderness anymore - but still, not everyone heard the call. In those first few years, it was a long uphill battle to get people to recognize what was happening. — James Patterson

Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. — Mark Fisher

Just as in policing there is an emphasis on civilians to help with paperwork, we must free up trained and experienced social workers to focus on children, not bureaucracy. — Andy Sawford

Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted, it breaks down representative government and overwhelms democracy. — Ronald Reagan

An official man is always an official man, and he has a wild belief in the value of reports. — Arthur Helps

We cannot meet 21st Century challenges with a 20th Century bureaucracy. — Barack Obama

Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy. — Chris Chocola

I do not support Common Core because there is absolutely no evidence that a big, centralized bureaucracy makes anything better. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. — Carly Fiorina

There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees" problem. — David Graeber

When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities committee, the signals that that sent through Ottawa were major, because that's what the bureaucracy understands. — Brian Mulroney

If there is a way to delay an important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it. — C. Northcote Parkinson

In government and out, there are vast realms of the bureaucracy dedicated to seeking more information, in perpetuity if need be, in order to avoid taking action. — Meg Greenfield

For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems. — George McGovern

Be prepared for the creation of an intrusive bureaucracy to police the ordinance by examining the books and payroll ledgers of businesses ... — Randy Hamilton

They [Greenpeace] forgot their original purpose and turned into a big, rich bureaucracy, more interested in fund-raising than in saving lives, so I got fed up and quit ... they're a bunch of wimps. — Paul Watson

When the fountains of government [borrowing] abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to public works, then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world. — John T. Flynn

What's really terrifying is when you realize that bureaucracy isn't simply a growth on the body of the State. If it were only that, it could be cut off. No, bureaucracy is the very essence of the State. — Vasily Grossman

We are for aiding our allies by sharing some of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107 We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a 2-million-dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. — Ronald Reagan

I think what's happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider. And if we can't get it right, with the relatively small number of veterans, how in the world are you going to do it with the entire population? — Benjamin Carson

The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts. — Paul Craig Roberts

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits. — Mohsin Hamid

It's hard to know which is more dystopian: the idea that your every move is being studied by occasionally malign figures of anonymous government authority, or that everything you've done in the public sphere has for years now been secretly recorded for no particular reason, by people who would rather be doing almost anything else, in an apotheosis of archival bureaucracy that you yourself pay for through tax. I — Geoff Manaugh

Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity. — Walter Bagehot

Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State - the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) - must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.8, 9 Of — Murray N. Rothbard

As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn't realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created. — Ronald Reagan

The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived. — Karl Marx

What is all this? Get him out of here, devil take me!" And that one, imagine, smiles and says: "Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!" And - bang! — Mikhail Bulgakov

The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth. — Christopher Riche Evans

I don't want a lot of bureaucracy ... I want to run state government the same way we run a campaign - efficient, effective and victorious. — Charlie Crist

I was utterly, breathtakingly, and touchingly clueless. That's how folks like me get jobs like mine: honor outweighs common sense. — Stephen L. Burns

Private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. Government loans will waste far more capital and resources than private loans. Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it. — Henry Hazlitt

Two more [birds added to her cage]. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!? - - - Miss Flite to Esther. [I thought a the last two a bit strange until I looked and saw the old definitions of gammon (as being double talk or obfuscation) and spinach (as being a spurious and unwanted growth). How appropriately summarized the situation! — Charles Dickens

I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, nonreligious man, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine; the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever. — Slavoj Zizek

When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees. As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law. — John Mica

The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil. — Raul Ramos Y Sanchez

Rather than Surrender to Bureaucracy, take it upon yourself to break it — Scott Belsky

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it. — David Halberstam

She knew the power of bureaucracy well enough to be aware she had to sit and be admonished until this stranger felt she had expressed sufficient disappointment in a girl she would never have to see again. — Thomm Quackenbush

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. — Ronald Reagan

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life - the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools - even universities - are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave. — Alvin Toffler

You can't be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for wealth creation — Ziad K. Abdelnour

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it. — Thomas Sowell

By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind. — Edward T. Hall

We need to remind our core supporters that we have not forgotten their concern with the way our democracy is being replaced by European bureaucracy in so many areas. — John Redwood

The 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. — Mark Steyn

Ever since mankind stopped wandering around aimlessly and started cultivating its own food, society has been growing more complex. As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. — Ben Aaronovitch

Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it. — Bill Bryson

I enjoy visiting building sites. Unlike the ordered anonymity of office bureaucracy or the featureless regularity of a factory assembly line, a building site appears disorderly and chaotic. In fact, there is organization, but it is a loose orchestration of many separate trademen, working side by side but not necessarily together. — Witold Rybczynski

All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression. — Jay Griffiths

The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait. — Leon Trotsky

What lessons does Thales Academy have to teach us? One of the key takeaways is that a mixture of high-quality instruction with a low-cost, no-frills mentality is a recipe that parents are flocking to. It's also one that draws heated opposition from liberals, who fear that parental choice will threaten their stranglehold on the education bureaucracy. The big news, of course, is that it will. — Anonymous

The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the gospel. — Philip Berrigan

The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it. ... The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise. — Atul Gawande

Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity. — Laurence J. Peter

Getting things done in this country, if you want to build something, if you want to start a company, it's getting to be virtually impossible with all of the bureaucracy and all of the approvals. — Donald Trump

If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.
What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment. — William Barrett

The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days. — Vandana Shiva

Paperwork is the embalming fluid of bureaucracy, maintaining an appearance of life where none exists. — Robert H. Meltzer

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. — Matt Taibbi

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. — Aldous Huxley

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true. — William Blake

Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which will put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill. — Michele Bachmann

Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy. — Brooks Atkinson

The real problem is clean up the bureaucracy that people have to deal with to become a citizen the right way. And we must truly secure the border. We can't leave it porous. — Herman Cain

Things there are no solution to: Inflation, bureaucracy & dandruff. — Malcolm Forbes

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
[From the Preface] — C.S. Lewis

It was as though the whole world was thrown back six or seven hundred years without having the organizations those ancient peoples had." He paused, breathing heavily. "Of course, there were many survivors who understood small skills. Some of them would repair small engines, but they couldn't manufacture them. They couldn't refine fuels. Fortunately a good many doctors who had practiced in small towns and in the country survived. They had their medical books, but they could no longer get the drugs they needed. Anyway, medicine survived after a fashion. Then gradually little patterns of order began to appear and another Bureaucracy came into being. — Hugh MacLennan

A good bureaucracy is the best tool of oppression ever invented. — Frank Herbert

I understand how bureaucracies work. And that's important because our government has become a vast, huge, bloated, corrupt bureaucracy. — Carly Fiorina

For the information of these "friends" who consider themselves called to defend against us the role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, we give warning that our book teaches not how to love a victorious revolution after the event, in the person of the bureaucracy it has brought forward, but only how a revolution is prepared,
how it develops, and how it conquers. A party is not for us a machine whose
sinlessness is to be defended by state measures of repression, but a complicated organism that like all living things develops in contradictions. — Leon Trotsky

A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens. — John Hickenlooper