Quotes & Sayings About Inefficiency

No politician or party favours waste and inefficiency, and every government tries to reduce both
but tax cuts on the promise of ending the gravy train almost never find enough gravy. Of course efficiency matters, waste must be attacked, and of course it matters how both taxes and spending are organized, but despite the highly publicized incidents of misspending that seem to dominate the pages of our mainstream media and disproportionately shape our perceptions, the numbers about waste never add up, and the consequences of tax cuts on public goods and services are always worse than promised. — Alex Himelfarb

His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle. — Nikola Tesla

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. — Albert Ellis

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else. — Theodore Roosevelt

Every good cause is worth some inefficiency. — Paul Samuelson

Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. — Aldous Huxley

Such philosophical musings risk inviting depression or inefficiency. Better just to fix the problem and move on to the next one. It's all part of being a service provider at the end of the line. — Katrina Firlik

The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth. — Nathan Myhrvold

Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government
in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player. — Milton Friedman

Unlike national markets, which tend to be supported by domestic regulatory and political institutions, global markets are only 'weakly embedded'. There is no global lender of last resort, no global safety net, and of course, no global democracy. In other words, global markets suffer from weak governance, and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy. — Dani Rodrik

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a disgrace, that two become a lawfirm, and that three or more become a congress. -John Adams — Sherman Edwards

It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. — George Bernard Shaw

Fat is a small word which belies its size in the girth of its connotations. Fat implies a certain ungainliness, an inefficiency, a sense of immobility, a lack of industry, an unpleasant, unaesthetic quality; unmotivated, unloved, unnatural, unusual, uninspired, unhappy, unlikely to go places or to fit, under the ground with a heart attack at fifty-five. In short, fat somewhat paradoxically involves the lack of many attributes which, you must concede, are generally held to be good. — Mohsin Hamid

I have a problem,' said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. 'I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers' collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?' 'Yes, of course.' 'Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists? — Adam Roberts

Watch with awe and amazement at how quickly an engineer will become totally annoyed by inefficiency. — Rands

Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status. — Greg Bear

The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality. — Margaret Thatcher

My mother's illness fitted into this protest against the treatment of the sick who could not pay, the inefficiency of commercialism, the waste, the extravagance, and the poverty. — Ellen Wilkinson

People were growing resentful of bureaucrats whose first mission in life seemed to be protecting their own jobs by keeping expensive programs alive long after their usefulness had expired. They were losing respect for politicians who kept voting for open-ended welfare programs riddled with fraud and inefficiency that kept generation after generation of families dependent on the dole. And they were growing mistrustful of the self-appointed intellectual elite back in Washington who claimed to know better than the people of America did how to run their lives, their businesses, and their communities. — Ronald Reagan

Well, people are like that too. THey create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is bare rock... And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself. — Agatha Christie

We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency. — Eamon De Valera

Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information. — Al Gore

Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I'm wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it. — Rands

The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters - from what to do with the crumbs to the grocer's telephone number - a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him. — Crystal Eastman

An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government. — Timothy Noah

Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless). — Bernard Crick

Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not in it frequently found together, and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two. — Edmund S. Morgan

The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry. — Marcia Angell

A vital function of the free market is to penalize inefficiency and misjudgment and to reward efficiency and good judgment. By distorting economic calculations and creating illusory profits, inflation will destroy this function. — Henry Hazlitt

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. — P. J. O'Rourke

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job. — Michael Lewis

Learning requires inefficiency. — Deborah Blum

Those who use the word 'anarchy' to mean disorder or misrule, are not in correct. If they regard government as necessary, if they think that we could not live without Whitehall or the White House directing our affairs, if they think politicians are essential to our well-being and that we could not behave socially without policemen, they are right in assuming that anarchy means the opposite to what government guarantees. But those who take the reverse opinion, and consider government to be tyranny, are right too in considering anarchy, no government, to be liberty. If government is the maintenance of privilege and exploitation
and inefficiency of distribution its tool then only anarchy is order. — Albert Meltzer

She lay awake at night, wondering what she ought to do. Life terrified her. She had a child's capacity for happiness, but also a child's fear, a child's inefficiency. When existence was a holiday, none could be more rapturously happy; but when there was business to be done, plans to be made, decisions taken, she was simply lost and terrified. — Aldous Huxley

Concentration breeds efficiency while division brings inefficiency, error, and tension. — Eknath Easwaran

Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. — Theodore Roosevelt

There is no remedy for the inefficiency of public management. — Ludwig Von Mises

How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings! — Edgar Allan Poe

The common belief that everyone can do anything if they just try hard enough is a formula for inefficiency at best and for complete failure at worst. — W.J. King

I loathed poverty and I would have liked to put my hands on the party who said that poverty is an honorable estate. It is an indication of inefficiency and nothing more. There is nothing honorable or fine about it. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The inefficiency of drill and the uncertainty of education are the "palpable" proof that man is an animal endowed with a soul- that is, with freedom. This is why every true upbringing is essentially self-upbringing and a negation of drill. The aim of true upbringing is not to change a man directly ( because , strictly speaking, that is not possible) but to incite an inner stream of experiences and to cause an inner decision to the benefit of good by means of example, advice, sight, or the like. Beyond that, man cannot be changed, only his behavior may be changed, and that could be feigned or temporary. — Alija Izetbegovic

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. — Henry David Thoreau

In the happy land of elegant code and pretty rainbows, there lives a spoil-sport monster called inefficiency. — Marijn Haverbeke

There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint. We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good. — Glenn Ligon

The Queen, watching from home, noted how the war began as a prodigiously popular thing; but this was the first war at which photographers, and a good war reporter (William Russell of The Times), had been present. When the inefficiency, and the sickness, and the sheer horror of the conflict became known, the public turned their wrath on the politicians. The — A. N. Wilson

If you are inefficient, you have a right to be afraid of the consequences. — Murad S. Shah

Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer's biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. — Jared Diamond

The Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy — Henry Ford

When a man, whether he is a leader or follower, admits that he is "too busy" to change his plans, or to give attention to any emergency, he admits his inefficiency. The successful leader must be the master of all details connected with his position. — Napoleon Hill

All the alleged key causes of SOE [State-Owned Enterprise] inefficiency the principal-agent problem, the free-rider problem and the soft budget constraint are, while real, not unique to state-owned enterprises. Large private-sector firms with dispersed ownership also suffer from the principal-agent problem and the free-rider problem. So, in these two areas, forms of ownership do matter, but the critical divide is not between state and private ownership it is between concentrated and dispersed ownerships. — Ha-Joon Chang

The UN special envoy on food called it a "crime against humanity" to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn't even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals. You're supporting vast inefficiency and pushing up the price of food for the poorest in the world, — Jonathan Safran Foer

OLD, adj. In that stage of usefulness which is not inconsistent with general inefficiency, as an "old man". Discredited by lapse of time and offensive to the popular taste, as an "old" book. — Ambrose Bierce

The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge. — Yanis Varoufakis

What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits - in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative - was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false. — Tony Judt

Sometimes the sadness seems almost unbearable, the problems unsolvable, the wounds unhealable. This has taught me one of the greatest lessons: the tension between inefficiency and faithfulness. The assurance that I must obey and be faithful, only to what He has asked of me, even when tangible, earthly results or successes are not seen. — Katie J. Davis

Here's where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs. Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient, they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous. — Alex Gibney

As an economy measures performance in terms of the creation of money, people become a major source of inefficiency. — David Korten

When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business. — Henry Hazlitt

Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency. — Eric Ambler

When you go to bed whenever and allow yourself to get up whenever, you reward your brain for continued laziness and inefficiency. — Steve Pavlina

Anarchy [is] necessarily consequent to inefficiency. — Thomas Jefferson

He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And them Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as he could see at least ten of its functions consisted of apologizing for its inefficiency in the other five. — Terry Pratchett

You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there's enough waste and inefficiency. — Richard Lamm

[The healthcare bill is a] headlong rush into socialism ... we will not stand for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid hijacking of our freedom and democracy so they can impose their socialist 'utopia' of higher taxes, restricted access, inferior quality, and deadly inefficiency on the best health care system in the world ... You and the RNC are all that stand between the Democrats' scheme to take more of your hard-earned income to pay for this unsustainable, freedom destroying entitlement and an opportunity to work for real, truly bipartisan step-by-step solutions ... — Michael Steele

The harm done by the FDA does not result from defects in the people in charge - unless it be a defect to be human. Many have been able and devoted civil servants. However, social, political, and economic pressures determine the behavior of the people supposedly in charge of a government agency to a far greater extent than they determine its behavior. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are rare - almost as rare as barking cats. That does not mean that effective reform is impossible. But it requires taking account of the political laws governing the behavior of government agencies, not simply berating officials for inefficiency and waste or questioning their motives and urging them to do better. The — Milton Friedman

The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency. — Eugene McCarthy

I've never been satisfied with myself, ever. But I feel good about myself, because I'm truthful. I don't corrupt myself. I'm also a perfectionist. I'm very impatient. I've got energy and drive and I can't stand inefficiency in people. And I can't stand dumb people. Why surround yourself with people who are going to tie you down? I don't suffer fools. — Jack LaLanne

A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due to some temporary inefficiency ... For each of us, really good investment opportunities aren't going to come along too often and won't last too long, so you've got to be ready to act and have a prepared mind. — Charlie Munger

Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance. — Henry Hazlitt

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. — Bill Gates

Instead of raising taxes as some would insist, we need to reduce waste and inefficiency in government. — Tim Murphy

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy. — Evgeny Morozov

You know what they say. If at first you don't succeed, try the same thing again. Sometimes the effort is called persistence and is the mark of a strong will. Sometimes it's called perseveration and is a sign of immaturity. For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behavior is called ... policy. — Thomas King

However, creativity is not so much about efficiency, but rather about inefficiency. — Wouter Boon

Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency. — Isaac Asimov

Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster. — Kathryn Minshew

The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil. — Nathan Myhrvold

That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems. — Paul Hawken

It is like using a smoke screen, the same thing for an individual. The topic here is Islam. If French politicians are no longer talking about Islam, they know they will have to talk about something else, which brings the spotlight on their inefficiency. They will have to talk about domestic social and economic issues and they will have to justify their foreign policy, which is obviously something they need to avoid at all costs. — Tariq Ramadan

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency. — Eugene McCarthy

Father expected a good deal of God. He didn't actually accuse God of inefficiency, but when he prayed his tone was loud and angry, like that of a dissatisfied guest in a carelessly managed hotel. — Clarence Day

In this context, I believe it is an imperative for the new President to select and install his team as quickly as possible, and this does not imply that he must or should appoint members of the 'other' party to his Cabinet, which could contribute to inaction and inefficiency. — Richard V. Allen

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time. — Matt Ridley

In a flash of insight, he wondered: could one use Boyer's enzyme to sever a plasmid precisely and use the sticky ends to attach a second DNA fragment? The hybrid plasmid might then be inserted into bacteria for cloning. The startling concept, if found to work, might solve the randomness and inefficiency of his plasmid transfer procedure. — Sally Hughes

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life. — Aldous Huxley

Only the schools' inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25. — George Leonard

Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated. — Seth Shostak

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else. — Theodore Roosevelt

He could hear church bells as he drowsed, both from the civil station and from the missionaries out beyond the slaughter house--different bells and rung with
different intent, for one set was calling firmly to Anglo-India, and the other feebly to mankind.
He did not object to the first set; the other he ignored, knowing their inefficiency. — E. M. Forster

Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency. — Robert A. Caro

Deeper state intervention in an economy means that bureaucratic waste, inefficiency and corruption are more likely to hold back growth. — Ian Bremmer

The thing about markets, and I think the thing people don't understand about that, is markets are not kind, but they're very efficient. So when the marketplace determines an inefficiency in the system, it corrects that, and a market system that's left alone will reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. — Randy Neugebauer

There is an intrinsic linkage between socialism and economic inefficiency. — Peter L. Berger

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization. — Charlton Ogburn

The Book Highlights and Attacks areas of Inefficiency and Hypocrisy in Government Offices. It injects the much-need Enema into its Highly Constipated System. — Mahesh Ubhayakar

Investing capital in the free market creates innovation, businesses, jobs and economic growth. Investing capital in the government creates more bureaucracy, more paperwork and inefficiency. — Michael Ramirez

In this country protection has always, to some extent, existed; but at some times it has been efficient, and at others not; and our tendency toward freedom or slavery has always been in the direct ratio of its efficiency or inefficiency. — Henry Charles Carey

Even if your company's financial condition can withstand the inefficiency of quality service, your brand likely won't. — Jim Blasingame