Quotes & Sayings About Red Tape

That is why I strongly believe we should working in Congress to make America a better place to run a business by reducing the costly burdens of bureaucracy and red tape. — Michael K. Simpson

What we need is leadership that can deal with our mess and begin to apply practical solutions to our problems. My goal is not to design hundreds of pages of government regulation and red tape like others propose. We need to outline commonsense policies and then knock some heads together if necessary to make them work. The fact is we are over-regulated. People can't move. They're stymied. Companies can't be built. We're over-regulated. — Donald J. Trump

The regulatory systems in place disincentive innovation. It's intense to fight the red tape. — Travis Kalanick

You know that I am living proof that the American Dream is real. Growing up, our congressman cut through government bureaucratic red tape to help my mom buy our first house. That's the kind of congressman I'll be. — Geoff Davis

On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. — Robert Graves

The NSA?"

"Yeah, they called and offered to help out. Same software they use for enhancing spy satellite imagery."

Venkat shrugged. "It's amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone's rooting for one man to survive. — Andy Weir

We in Congress need to do everything possible to encourage and cultivate small businesses, so that they can expand and create jobs. Far too often, however, U.S. small businesses are impeded by government paperwork and bureaucratic red tape. — Kay Hagan

The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink. — Joseph Conrad

Health care comprises nearly 20 percent of our national economy, but outdated bureaucracy and red tape have stifled competition and raised costs. As a result, today more than 45 million are without any health coverage. — John Shadegg

We too often hear about red tape but what they mean is the vital rights of workers. — Frances O'Grady

Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence. — Thomas Carlyle

In order for me to get through all the red tape and just allow people to just get at my talent, I've got to set the record straight. And you can't set half the record straight; when you tell it, you've got to tell it all. — Corey Clark

However many people complain about the "red tape," it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices ... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism. — Max Weber

How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel?
We'll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate. — Peter F. Hamilton

International friendly games are not worth the lives of the silk worms who perish to make the pennants. They do not even have the philanthropic excuse that softens the otherwise unendurable tedium of testimonial matches. Quite simply, they are rotten games staged to pick the public's pocket, tiresome red tape left over from an era when nations and players were still insular and therefore curious about each other's potential. — Danny Baker

I remember Adrian [Maben, director] had lots of problems with red tape and dealing with stuff. I think we lost two or three days. Maybe those were the days we had to walk around the summit of Vesuvius, and we went around to the sulfur pits where the ground is bubbling. It's near here. It's fantastic. — David Gilmour

I had no red tape. I didn't even have any clear tape or duct tape or electrical tape.
Nope. I lived a tape-free life and liked it. Unless, you know, I needed to tape something. — Darynda Jones

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

Duct tape can't fix stupid," Bas growled. "Maybe not," Red replied, "but it can hold it down and muffled the screams. — T. Hammond

Mr. Purty has cheered me up. The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding ... (Richard Russo, Straight Man) — Richard Russo

The First Amendment rejects red tape, cover-up and double-speak. — Roy Barnes

The red tape for family members who want to speak to a loved one is a reality, ... The warehousing of prisoners is a reality ... All of this needs to be looked at, not just medical care. — Christopher Bullock

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature. — Edward Bellamy

Intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When — Matt Taibbi

We can get rid of red tape. — Charlie Daniels

"Thanks," many small businesspeople are saying, "but no thanks. Forget the government credits and loan programs, and just get rid of all the bureaucratic red tape and high taxes which make it hard to build businesses, hire employees and meet our payroll." — Oliver DeMille

Detective Inspector Carver took a picture from the breast pocket of his suit. He handed it to me. 'This is what you did, Michael. Take a good look. See if it jogs your memory.'
I gawped at the mutilated corpse of a naked young girl lying on a blood-soaked double bed. Her hands were bound to the brass headboard with duct tape. Blood covered her upper body, and her long blonde hair was streaked a murderous shade of red. One eye stared at the ceiling as if searching for salvation, the other, a bloody unrecognisable pulp, bore no relation to its sightless counterpart.
'Carla Marie Coombs. Twenty-one years of age. Do you recognise her, Michael? — Mark Tilbury

Red tape has killed more people than bullets... — Ben Bova

We are determined to improve the economic environment by getting foreign investors in and by cutting red tape. — Igor Luksic

I preferred measuring deer tracks to tape - that I liked the wild liberty of the Red men better then the tyranny of my brothers. — Sam Houston

People say nice things to me
like that I ought to run for president
which tells me that they like me. But I have my own deadline for how long I should be in Washington. I think you can get accustomed to red tape and many unfair things that go on in government. Once you stop getting angry about inefficiencies, waste, and injustice, you ought to get out. That's my time limit. — Elizabeth Holtzman

We've got great potential in our country and the only way we're going to make sure kids are getting the degrees that they need, make sure we're getting through that red tape, is by working together. — Amy Klobuchar

This is the second Simply Red song on this tape. One's unforgivable. Two's a war crime. Can I fast-forward? — Nick Hornby

If I'm dying from anything, it's from indifference and red tape. — Vito Russo

I am overwhelmed by the rigmarole of bureaucratic paperwork. I can't keep it all straight - the unemployment forms, the food-stamp applications, the drastically increasing number of ID cards that I am being forced to carry around with me. Being poor is a full-time job. Every minute, the government demands that you prove your current economic status, leaving absolutely no time to improve it. I have to schedule job interviews between all my other red-tape appointments. — Cassie Peterson

As policymakers, we need to foster an environment that allows U.S.-based innovators and entrepreneurs to compete and to flourish. Excessive regulations and bureaucratic red tape dramatically increase the cost of doing business and create uncertainty for companies. — Ralph Hall

It was damn hard leaving you," he said. "I was afraid that if I didn't, you'd be killed or tortured, or we both would."
-Kathy Kulig, Red Tape — Kathy Kulig

I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape. — James Q. Wilson

Here in the UK the government has decided to accept the recommendations of the Better Regulation Task Force to measure and make targeted reductions in the administrative costs - the red tape costs - that regulations impose on business. — John Hutton

Asia can learn much from Europe. Trade could be made easier in Asia, and the conditions for doing business could be improved by reducing red tape. In this regard, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have done better than the best in Europe. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

It's all papers and forms, the entire Civil Service is like a fortress made of papers, forms and red tape. — Alexander Ostrovsky

Every step that produces a single job for a currently unemployed European should be taken. Every centimetre of red tape that puts someone out of work must be torn up. — Timothy Garton Ash

It's about businesses nervous about taking on school leavers because of a mass of red tape. It's about health and safety regulations and green fines. — Nigel Farage

While big business gain subsidies and political access, small businesses drown in red tape, and individuals now risk being classified as terrorists for complaining about it. Economic globalisation is about homogenising differences in the worlds' markets, cultures, tastes and traditions. It's about giving big business access to a global market. — Zac Goldsmith

Forget the state concerns
we think this is bad for churches. Most churches are small and not ready to handle 500 pages of government red tape. — Michael Tanner

There's a great body of people who flower at night, who feel night is their time. Night is the time people truly become individuals, because all the familiar things are dark and done, all the restrictions on freedom are removed. Many artists work at night - it is particularly conducive to creative work. Many of us attuned to night are not artists but are embattled against the official, organized, righteous day people who are completely bound by their switchboards and their red tape. — John Crosby

Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape. — Charles Dickens

I cannot abide red tape. It never strangles bad ideas, only good ones. — Gillian Anderson

After receiving such a warm welcome, it sounded to me like the Directorate of Intelligence had placed me on the CIA's "don't screw with this guy list". This list was something of an urban legend throughout The Company. Once on it, you had it made. Everyone at the CIA would go out of his or her way to be helpful and red tape would magically vanish for you. It meant that you had a very powerful patron at the top levels of the Agency. I may have been hustled out of Headquarters but I apparently still had a very powerful friend in high places. — Michael Connick

God is already given you the power to crush down the red & white tape says you can't proceed beyond certain places. He's given you the keys to open all the door were been slammed on your face; now is the time to take your very first step towards your dreams and goals. — Euginia Herlihy

The fire department is like a security blanket that helps citizens sleep at night; they know if the unthinkable ever happens there is someone to call for help. If and when that call is made, we respond to it like no other government agency. No red tape, nothing to be taken under advisement, just a simple call brings immediate action. — D.E. McCourt

When they return home from serving our country, our National Guard and Reserve members shouldn't have to be confronted with red tape in order to access the benefits they've earned fighting for our country. — Kirsten Gillibrand

My dad bought a Beatles tape when I was in fifth grade, and that was the first time I ever really - I mean I was into music, but that was the first time it really blew my mind. When I heard the 'Red Compilation,' which wasn't like a proper album, I thought, 'music was more than I had ever thought it was before.' — Andrew Dost

Conquering the universe one has to solve two problems: gravity and red tape. We could have mastered gravity. — Wernher Von Braun

All this red tape and form-filling. That's what comes of a bureaucratic state. Can't go where you like and do as you please anymore! Somebody's always asking questions. — Agatha Christie

The second building was enormous. Its central corridor looked long enough to stage a hundred-yard-dash in. I contemplated making one. Ever since the Army, big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck-passing, hurry up and wait. Only now and then you met a man with enough gumption to keep the big machine from bogging down of its own weight. — Ross Macdonald

The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs. — David Graeber

The sooner we rein in the red tape factory in Washington, D.C., the sooner small businesses can get back to creating jobs and helping more Americans find an honest day's work. — Geoff Davis

I think 'The Wire' really is relatable. It reflects an ongoing issue across America, about inaccuracies in major cities between rich and the poor and some of the things that go on behind the red tape of council and government bodies. — Idris Elba

Sometimes sexy women like to act stupid because it helps them get exactly what they want. Theresa Boudreaux was one of those types: a bodacious waffle-house waitress with a devilish streak. Unfortunately for a certain high-ranking elected leader, she had the wits to go to RadioShack and buy herself a nine-dollar phone-recording device. She then used it to tape her dirty phone calls with US Congressman Huey Hartley, a powerful, sanctimonious, married-for-thirty-years politician from the solidly red state of Mississippi. — Holly Peterson

All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency. — Rosellen Brown

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape. — James Surowiecki

I am designating a new Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers to cut through red tape and ensure that the full resources of our federal government are leveraged to assist the workers, communities, and regions that rely on our auto industry. — Barack Obama

My job is to support businesses, that means promoting British commerce in the big emerging markets that have been neglected in the past. It means keeping Britain open to inward investors, trade and skilled workers. It means cutting red tape which is suffocating growing companies which create jobs. — Vince Cable

We must continue to liberalise the single market, cut red tape and basically create a digital single market. We have not completed the single market yet, there is not sufficient free movement of goods, labour, services and money. We have to keep on working at that against all the protectionist tendencies that we have right now. — Alexander Stubb

Roller Boogie is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minute TDK Compact Cassette, and like everything else made in the '70s, it's beige. It takes me back to the fall of 1979, when I was a shy, spastic, corduroy-clad Catholic kid from the suburbs of Boston, grief-stricken over the '78 Red Sox. The words "douche" and "bag" have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-yer-old self. My body, my brain, my elbows that stuck out like switchblades, my feet that got tangled in my bike spokes, but most of all my soul - these formed the waterbed where douchitude and bagness made love sweet love with all the feral intensity of Burt Reynolds and Rachel Ward in Sharkey's Machine. — Rob Sheffield

The serious questions that are talked out or strangled with red tape are more numerous than those that are killed by silence; the number of people whose ideas are knocked on the head in societies is greater in our day than that of the solitary fighters who go under. — Ellen Key

How little chance the Holy Ghost has nowadays. The churches and missionary societies have so bound Him in red tape that they practically ask Him to sit in a corner while they do the work themselves. — Charles Studd

There are those who are trying to create an anti-business culture in Britain - and we have to stop them. At stake are not pay packages for a few but jobs and prosperity for the many. Everything in politics encourages more red tape - everyone insists government must step in - 'something must be done' is always the cry. We have to resist these pressures. — George Osborne

We cannot afford the EPA's continued expansion of red tape that is slowing economic growth and threatening to entangle millions of small businesses. — Fred Upton

i do not know why it is, vincent, but there are certain people in positions of power who take pleasure in obstructing others — Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

Usually, a country without a strong military would have had its politicians strung up by their entrails long before they managed to create quite this much red tape. — Evan Currie

Mike Morrison, vice president and dean of the University of Toyota, likes to ask employees: "What's on the other side of your card?" In other words, the front of your business card may read "Managing Director," but you may better identify with "big picture thinker" or "educator" or "calm under fire." This kind of information - or even a few simple details like where a person lives, what his or her favorite hobby is - cuts through the red tape to get somewhere more meaningful, and it can more immediately and effectively forge a connection between two people. — Shawn Achor

The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding. — Richard Russo

Red tape will often get in your way. It's one of the reasons I often carry scissors! — Richard Branson

Washington politicians think that government can make better decisions than you and me. But we know better. We know it's smaller, less intrusive government that will lead to real economic prosperity. We know it's business-friendly policies, not more red tape, that will create real growth. — Brad Wenstrup

Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the "reasonable person" standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34 — Philip K. Howard

STEVE: No, we maintain the accounts offshore, just until we get approvals. BILL: To get around approvals? STEVE: To get around approvals until we get approvals. There's a lot of red tape, a lot of bureaucracy. I — Tracy Letts

Don't you want this?" The pain in his voice ripped a hole inside her.
"I want you so damn much." Her words choked in her throat. She forced a laugh to keep from crying. "Hell, we can't seem to keep our hands off each other."
"Should we try?"

-Kathy Kulig, Red Tape — Kathy Kulig

Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it's all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple-red convertible ... stoned, ripped, twisted ... Good People. — Hunter S. Thompson

When the Devil goeth about like a roaring lion, he goeth about in a shape by which few but savages and hunters are attracted. But, when he is trimmed, smoothed, and varnished, according to the mode: when he is aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used up as to bliss; then, whether he take to the serving out of red tape, or to the kindling of red fire, he is the very Devil. — Charles Dickens

Unfortunately, we are finding the bureaucratic inefficiencies and red tape have a tendency to slow the efforts of individuals and communities working to rebuild. — Bobby Jindal

I think food trucks are the new answer to American fast food. The idea of raising two or three million dollars and going through red tape to open a restaurant, there's lots of barriers to success. There's a really easy jumping place for food trucks. It's very hip and acceptable for new chefs to open a food truck first. — Tyler Florence

At first it was a bit strange and daunting to have to wear a mask, but afterwards I came to enjoy it. In warm conditions, though, it started to slip off my face. Other times they used this double-sided sticky tape, and I literally couldn't get it off my face. I would feel like I was ripping my face off and I had a lot of cuts and bruises because of it-huge red marks. People might think it was method acting. — Gerard Butler

During the twentieth century, however, the size, scope, and power of government exploded. Total government spending increased from 6.73 percent of GDP in 1906 to 37.79 percent of GDP in 2014.[2] The dollar has lost more than 95 percent of its value due to the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve. Top marginal income tax rates have been as high as 94 percent. Entitlement programs now constitute more than 60 percent of the federal budget. And businesses are hog-tied by more than 175,000 pages of red tape in the Code of Federal Regulations. What — Michael Dahlen