Bureaucratic Quotes

#1. As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.

Adam Smith

#2. There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Elliot Richardson

#3. Sometimes being an artist is a real drag. It can be incredibly bureaucratic.

Micah Lexier

#4. Too often, nonprofits are viewed as rigid and bureaucratic - less nimble and capable of adapting in this fluid environment than our corporate counterparts. I don't agree.

Anna Maria Chavez

#5. Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.

Howard Rheingold

#6. In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.

Kate Millett

#7. After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs)

Charles Stross

#8. I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites.

Russell Brand

#9. Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

P.D. James

#10. Diesel fuel is too important to our farmers at harvest time and to the truckers delivering commerce across Nebraska to allow a bureaucratic hurdle to slow the delivery of fuel.

Dave Heineman

#11. Cioran, bureaucratic heart of the Empire. Or if not heart, kidney. Maybe small bowel.

James S.A. Corey

#12. Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.

John James Cowperthwaite

#13. We need to get rid of all remnants of bureaucracy and bureaucratic thinking, and start thinking like entrepreneurs again.

Larry Sanger

#14. The bureaucratic method of building an integrated Europe has exhausted its potential.

George Soros

#15. The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

Max Weber

#16. The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology.

Serge Lang

#17. Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.

David Sedaris

#18. There is no lack of bravery in the ranks of our armed forces, but bureaucratic cowardice rules in our intelligence establishment (as well as at the higher levels of military command).

Ralph Peters

#19. My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

Reed Hastings

#20. We found that the most exciting environments, that treated people very well, are also tough as nails. There is no bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo ... excellent companies provide two things simultaneously: tough environments and very supportive environments.

Tom Peters

#21. Brussels has become inefficient and very bureaucratic, which makes it slow to do things. The concept of the United States of Europe will never work.

Jim Ratcliffe

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

Robert Conquest

#23. The danger is that the compromises and special interests inherent in Kyoto-style targets and cap-and-trade will be accepted because of bureaucratic momentum.

James Hansen

#24. Appeal to all scholars of stupidity in the world. Come to Italy, this country has the highest rate of morons of the universe, especially among political, bureaucratic, judicial, religious, intellectual, artistic, and mass media members, so it is the best place to develop your own field research.

William C. Brown

#25. For political and bureaucratic reasons, governments at all levels are telling far less to the public than to insiders about how to prepare for and behave in the initial chaos of a mass-casualty event.

Barton Gellman

#26. The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.

David Graeber

#27. Korea can't become a 'first-class' nation unless regulation and 'a sense of power' disappear. The nation's politics is the fourth-class, bureaucratic are the third-class, and business is the second-class.

Lee Kun-hee

#28. If one accepts Jean Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.

David Graeber

#29. 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.

David Graeber

#30. Thoughts aren't the problem. Problems only develop when thoughts no longer arise from or refer to actual experience. That's when thoughts start ossifying into their own bureaucratic institutions, becoming assumptions and dogma.

Ethan Nichtern

#31. I joined the city government, and we start to operate as the bureaucrats on the local level, so we were the only ones in the whole Russian team who were experienced in practical bureaucratic management in the complicated condition of 1990.

Anatoly Chubais

#32. My work is made on lines similar to those of a film production. A lot of my work is kind of bureaucratic, endlessly phoning up people, trying to find the cameraman and the lighting man, because I am a total technology-phobe, quite helpless with equipment.

Sam Taylor-Wood

#33. 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

#34. Socialism isn't a dirty word; it just means sharing. Really, it's just the bureaucratic arm of Christianity.

Russell Brand

#35. OFSTED has made large cuts in the paperwork which schools are asked to provide and further steps to reduce the bureaucratic burden will be introduced in September.

Estelle Morris

#36. The bureaucratic culture that we [Afghanistan] have inherited is an obstacle. Hierarchies may be extremely efficient for dealing with certain events, but they are not quick in responding to global, flexible networks.

Ashraf Ghani

#37. A lot of times I make people better by getting stupid, distracting, bureaucratic stuff off their desk. That's an incredibly easy way to make a senior person more productive.

Gabe Newell

#38. 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

#39. A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.

A.E. Samaan

#40. Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Barbara Tuchman

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

Ian Bremmer

#42. In order to have greater visibility of the larger cyber threat landscape, we must remove the government bureaucratic stovepipes that inhibit our abilities to effectively defend America while ensuring citizens' privacy and civil liberties are also protected.

Michael McCaul

#43. Overall, the work of rebuilding and transforming government for the digital age is only just beginning. Governments remain organized according to political and bureaucratic imperatives, not according to what makes the most sense to citizens.

Andrew Leigh

#44. Some of this is bureaucratic ineptitude and a great deal of this is an administration that doesn't understand the urgency of the situation, and therefore this [Barack Obama] administration has not reached out actively to the private sector and said, we need help.

Carly Fiorina

#45. Nothing, Ismet thought, makes a more fanatical official than a Latin. Organization is alien to their natures, but once they get a taste for it they take to it like drink. They claim to be impulsive, but they're the most bureaucratic of all, whatever they say.

Shirley Hazzard

#46. Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

James Lee Burke

#47. It is through states that the American people get the job done every day, often in spite of a deeply flawed bureaucratic federal government.

Rick Perry

#48. In high school, I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles, and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done, and nobody was really interested in getting anything done.

Rashida Jones

#49. Would-be adoptive parents have to struggle for years through a bureaucratic obstacle course at an average cost of $30,000.

Foster Friess

#50. We can't afford to sacrifice another generation of American children to bureaucratic politics. We've got to get it done. The future, the health, the life - our nation depends on it and it's just foolish to think or act otherwise.

LeVar Burton

#51. 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

#52. In the bureaucratic machine of socialism the way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.

Ludwig Von Mises

#53. No private enterprise will ever fall prey to bureaucratic methods of management if it is operated with the sole aim of making profit.

Ludwig Von Mises

#54. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.

Leon Trotsky

#55. Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up.

Michael J. Gelb

#56. There's something remarkably artificial about a certain type of bureaucratic sterility, like even it can't make up its mind whether or not it actually exists.

Seanan McGuire

#57. 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

#58. To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run afoul of some agency or other.

Michel Houellebecq

#59. Unfortunately, bureaucratic problems at the federal level are causing many other small Washington companies to be denied federal funding that would help transfer their ideas from their laboratories into our homes and hospitals.

Jay Inslee

#60. there's nothing worse on this earth than privileged bureaucratic assholes who work the system. they never get caught, and if they do, there are no real consequences.

C.J. Box

#61. People feel that European institutions are remote and bureaucratic, run by shady cosmopolitan elites. Britain is not absolutely exceptional because if you look at the opinion polls, those sentiments are now quite widespread also in continental Europe.

Timothy Garton Ash

#62. Today's public education system is a failed monopoly: bureaucratic, rigid and in unsteady control of dissatisfied captive markets.

David T. Kearns

#63. NASA should not be developing its own proprietary version of capabilities it could purchase commercially at much lower cost, especially when we know the agency's bureaucratic tendencies will be to view the commercial versions as competitors to kill.

Newt Gingrich

#64. The politics of Europe is unimaginative and bureaucratic.

Marjorie Scardino

#65. The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.

Ayn Rand

#66. We're at the crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is a proud, solid, reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.

Newt Gingrich

#67. The rest of us learned the simple lesson - invaluable in a bureaucratic society - that there is no moral or practical obligation to tell the truth when filling in forms.

Auberon Waugh

#68. America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.

Felix Dennis

#69. 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

#70. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity. I

Emma Cline

#71. Anti-digital mindsets are those "status quo" types of thinking, authoritarian attitude, and bureaucratic decision-making.

Pearl Zhu

#72. hated the British business culture which I saw as slow, bureaucratic, cumbersome, lacking customer service, lacking initiatives.

Elisabeth Marx

#73. For many of the brave men and women who have fought on the front lines, returning home means trying to navigate a complicated and bureaucratic Veterans Administration benefits system.

Kirsten Gillibrand

#74. And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

Edward Abbey

#75. Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles ... they all sounded to me like extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly.

Joel Spolsky

#76. MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior.

Carl Sagan

#77. Governments take too long to get things done and there are far too many varied interests at stake. If you were starting a business today and needed a partner, you would never choose a large bureaucratic institution like the government.

Naveen Jain

#78. After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast and the airfield.

Tom Hooper

#79. The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.

Ludwig Von Mises

#80. Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence.

Leon Trotsky

#81. Bureaucratic nonsense at airports drives me crazy.

Dominic Monaghan

#82. I have found, in over fifty years of confronting governments and defending cooperatives from political and bureaucratic interference, that when you begin demanding what is rightfully yours, there are many people even within the bureaucratic system who ensure that you retain those rights.

Verghese Kurien

#83. Unlike what happened after Pearl Harbor, however, the Bush administration would not order a "review of how they could have been so badly surprised" because the results would have shown "a colossal bureaucratic failure, combined with inattention and a lack of political will at the top.

Andrew P. Napolitano

#84. Institutions which have too much security ... tend to become bureaucratic. They add layers of people and layers of rules in order to assure the security of not making mistakes.

Judith M Bardwick

#85. It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus ... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.

Charles Stross

#86. In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a revolution that would end the abuses and injustices of capitalism and the privileges of a bureaucratic caste, collective faith does not exist.

Juan Goytisolo

#87. Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying ... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.

Ivan Illich

#88. In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.

Milton Friedman

#89. The home ownership process for Native Americans has been hobbled by bureaucratic delays and regulations.

Rick Renzi

#90. As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse.

Carl Sagan

#91. Bureaucratic cultures arise to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which arise from having the wrong people on the bus in the first place.

James C. Collins

#92. Agribusiness - with its wicked powerful lobby and its infiltration of top bureaucratic posts - essentially runs roughshod over the government agencies that are supposed to monitor it. It's the rich fox guarding the filthy, overcrowded henhouse.

Jane Velez-Mitchell

#93. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.

Max Weber

#94. National security is a place where the private sector could be helpful because the government is woefully behind the technology curve. But secondly, the bureaucratic processes that have been in place since 9/11 are woefully inadequate as well.

Carly Fiorina

#95. Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.

Jack Kemp

#96. Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy - not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous.

Douglas Adams

#97. The high-handed bureaucratic excesses of the IRS are a national disgrace ... riding roughshod over the taxpayers and making a joke out of our rule of laws.

Paul Laxalt

#98. The more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.

David Graeber

#99. An hour ago Franks had been swatted across the Strip by a dragon made of ectoplasm and nightmares. Bureaucratic plotting seemed inconsequential in comparison.

Larry Correia

#100. In these modes, energy is at best regarded by architects as a set of necessary quantifications, bureaucratic mandates, and checklists rather than as a fundamental agent in novel formations of architecture.

William W. Braham