Bureaucrats Are Quotes

#1. Bureaucrats are the only people in the world who can say absolutely nothing and mean it.

Hugh Sidey

#2. Politicians and bureaucrats are substituting their uninformed, largely political decisions for those of the marketplace. Their past miscalculations demonstrate that they do not and cannot possess the information, knowledge, means, and discipline to manage the economy.

Mark Levin

#3. It saddens me when public officials and bureaucrats are criticized for ulterior motives, none of which I have ever found in a government bureaucrat, or when someone personalizes disagreements.

Michael K. Powell

#4. Amateur bureaucrats are often even worse than professional bureaucrats.

John McCarthy

#5. The aristocrats and bureaucrats are dirty rats.

Ray Davies

#6. It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachey, sour-stomached, middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them know it, many about now are already onto the second or third pint or highball glass, which produces a certain desperate aura here.

Thomas Pynchon

#7. There are people with vested interest who do not want us to reform our energy sector so that we remain dependent on imports. All reform moves are resisted. Bureaucrats are hesitant to take bold decisions.

Veerappa Moily

#8. Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

Ezra Pound

#9. A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it ...

Thomas Pynchon

#10. But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.

Tahir Shah

#11. Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#12. Politicians and bureaucrats are the new upper class in Norway. It is an upper class that is growing by an increasing number of top-paid politicians in municipalities and counties. They let the people suffer, but let themselves go free.

Carl I. Hagen

#13. Bureaucrats complicate. It gives them more work to do. It gives them job security. It means promotions as ever more bureaucrats are added to the Ministry of Redundancy.

Sieg Pedde

#14. Bad judges, lousy cops, greedy lawyers, lazy prosecutors, mediocre teachers, and incompetent bureaucrats are inevitable. When they happen, they should be weeded out and sent back to school to learn something about moral courage and the Golden Rule.

Dennis McDougal

#15. Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#16. When each of us is free to work out his own economic destiny, within the framework of the market economy, the institution of private property, and the general rule of law, we will all improve our economic condition much faster than when we are ordered around by bureaucrats.

Henry Hazlitt

#17. To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

Ai Weiwei

#18. Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states "accountable" for their education performance ... In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats.

Ron Paul

#19. No Child Left Behind taught us that parents, teachers and state and local leaders are more suited to address students' needs than a one-size-fits-all accountability system developed by Washington bureaucrats.

John Kline

#20. The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted
or rather tend to be corrupted
by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

Vladimir Lenin

#21. The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

Bertrand Russell

#22. Monsters are entirely mythological, sir, like spirits, werebeasts, and competent bureaucrats.

George R R Martin

#23. Iowans are feeling the pinch of a big federal government, and elected officials like Bruce Braley keep championing the over reaching bureaucracy. Iowans know what is best for Iowa more than Washington politicians and bureaucrats do.

Joni Ernst

#24. Journalists are supposed to be skeptical, that's what keeps them digging rather than simply accepting the official line, whether it comes from government or corporate bureaucrats.

Linda Chavez

#25. Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.

Thomas Sowell

#26. In the political system, we are a team; politics and bureaucracy, we are a team. The politicians, bureaucrats and the people, we are a team.

Narendra Modi

#27. Do we really want the people who created $40 trillion of unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare in charge of our health care? Faceless bureaucrats, power-lusting politicians, and people spending other people's money are a recipe for disaster.

Ed Crane

#28. You give bureaucrats power over others, and when the others are poor and helpless, nothing matches government. More than any single exploitive tyrannical force, the possibility of what government can do is absolutely terrifying.

Millicent Fenwick

#29. There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians, no matter how well meaning, are better at solving problems than the people on the spot, who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right.

Elinor Ostrom

#30. You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Thomas Sowell

#31. Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees.

Seth Godin

#32. Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

Alan Keyes

#33. Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

David Graeber

#34. Government should be of the people, by the people, for the people. What part of that do politicians and government bureaucrats not understand? Government has no right to keep secrets from the people. The people are paying for it. It's THEIR government. They have a right to know everything going on.

Wayne Allyn Root

#35. I can't help thinking if she - the director of a government agency - is this ignorant about what funding is available and where the money comes from - how often lower-level bureaucrats must give wrong answers when people are looking for help to start a business.

Matthew Lesko

#36. Bureaucrats behave very differently than a private-sector manager because their motivations are different. Permanent bureaucrats, no matter how senior, worry about their next job.

John Sununu

#37. Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet:
to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.

P. J. O'Rourke

#38. The proposal is frequently made that the government ought to assume the risks that are "too great for private industry." This means that bureaucrats should be permitted to take risks with the tax payer's money that no one is willing to take with his own.

Henry Hazlitt

#39. We are turning into a nation of rigid, mindless, rule-driven bureaucrats, incapable or unwilling to exercise any degree of common sense or compassion.

Joseph Befumo

#40. Have we never had to compromise before? Of course, hundreds of times! And will hundreds more! And not with gods, but with lousy bureaucrats, with nits who are disgusting to touch.

Arkady Strugatsky

#41. For most Americans, Friday afternoons are filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. In Washington, it's where government officials dump stories they want to bury. Good news gets dropped on Monday so bureaucrats can talk about it all week.

John Sununu

#42. 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

#43. Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.

Joel Miller

#44. I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

Margaret Atwood

#45. When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

Michel Faber

#46. We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.

Kenzaburo Oe

#47. Democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.

Anne Stevenson

#48. From my experience in working with bureaucrats and politicians, if you are a credible business group, they will definitely help you. At the end of the day, they, too, want development of their constituency, state or country.

Gautam Adani

#49. The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

John Berger

#50. What we have now is democracy without citizens. No one is on the public's side. All the buyers are on the corporations' side. And the bureaucrats in the Administration don't think the government belongs to the people.

Ralph Nader

#51. The most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. - These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible.

Erich Maria Remarque