Top 100 Quotes About Bureaucrats
#1. Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.
Ludwig Von Mises
#2. We still have systems we don't need, we have infrastructure we don't need. Why do you have over 900,000 bureaucrats working in one way or another in all these systems.
John Kasich
#3. I would replace most foreign aid with a tax credit for businesses to invest. I think U.S. bureaucrats giving foreign bureaucrats money is a guaranteed failure. And we've had about 50 years' experience at failing with foreign aid.
Newt Gingrich
#4. It's not just other countries in Europe having a say over what we do. It's unelected bureaucrats in Brussels on sort of six-figure, huge salaries telling us how we run our country despite having never stood for an election themselves.
David Cameron
#5. It's all about intelligence; and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap.
Tom Clancy
#6. To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a design committee of bureaucrats.
Henry Spencer
#8. On one of the most personal matters of our lives, our health care, President Obama would turn decision making over to government bureaucrats. He forced through Obama-care and I will repeal it.
Mitt Romney
#9. 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
#10. Ten-year-old boys move differently than middle-aged women, who move differently than athletic guys, who move differently than government bureaucrats.
Brad Bird
#11. I draw a contrast between American shared governance with "the dictatorship of ministries" wherein policy and direction for the university is ordered by bureaucrats who have never taught a class.
Henry Rosovsky
#12. 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
#13. The only way government bureaucrats know of keeping prosperity going is to inflate some more - to increase the deficit or to pump more money into the system.
Henry Hazlitt
#14. Bureaucrats are the only people in the world who can say absolutely nothing and mean it.
Hugh Sidey
#15. Advocacy groups, politicians, and bureaucrats use the government to advance their private good instead of the common good.
Joel Miller
#16. We don't need unelected federal agency bureaucrats in Washington telling our states what they can and can't do with respect to protecting their limited taxpayer dollars in private enterprises.
Marsha Blackburn
#17. Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes.
Frank Schatzing
#18. 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
#19. In case anyone needs reminding, it was the relentless drive of the tourism industry and kowtowing State Department bureaucrats that led to the Bush-era Visa Express Program, which relaxed visa policies, eliminated in-person consulate interviews and opened the door to the 9/11 hijackers.
Michelle Malkin
#20. The problem doesn't lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead. Here
Seth Godin
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Gorbachevism, carried out by mediocre but ambitious party bureaucrats, is an attempt not only to outdo the people but also the objective laws of human society.
Alexander Zinoviev
#24. How can faceless bureaucrats in an intelligence agency deny brave soldiers a chance to tell the truth?
Curt Weldon
#25. Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.
Henry Hazlitt
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Bureaucrats do not, as a whole, like to make decisions. Decisions require a degree of courage and responsibility, qualities in short supply among public servants on both sides of the Great Divide.
Kati Marton
#31. Prior to passage of Obamacare, Americans spoke out against the individual mandate; they didn't want to change the health care they had; they didn't want a 3,000-page bill that empowered 15 Washington bureaucrats to decide the future of the doctor-patient relationship.
Fred Upton
#32. I think everyone remembers how certain Russian bureaucrats used to work against the Ukrainian opposition; I think it is hard to drop old habits.
Yulia Tymoshenko
#33. Politicians and bureaucrats must learn to stay away from the day-by-day functioning of business.
Adi Godrej
#34. 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
#35. What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#36. People change their opinion according to your position. And both politicians and bureaucrats begin to take you more seriously, as they suddenly feel you have become more important.
Rajeev Shukla
#37. People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them.
Ronald Reagan
#38. One thing about bureaucrats is that they never swallow their young. Leave them alone and you'll find them increasing every year.
Robert Menzies
#40. 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
#41. Since politicians and bureaucrats can rarely sign real contracts, the best way to prove you'll do something later is to do it now
Garett Jones
#42. If entrepreneurs were running schools, instead of bureaucrats, schools would be teaching a lot more of the skills and mindsets found in this book. Since they're not, this book is a necessary antidote to a traditional college education.
Scott Banister
#43. 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
#44. I'm afraid I don't suffer petty bureaucrats gladly. A very bad habit, but one I find hard to break. Nevertheless, you will find, Dr. Kelly, that humiliation and blackmail, when used judiciously, can be marvelously effective
Douglas Preston
#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. [I]f we care about our remaining liberties we must at some point draw a line in the sand and let politicians and bureaucrats know we will not tolerate further encroachment on our God-given rights to liberty.
Walter E. Williams
#47. You also wonder if a restaurant placed an ad that read, "Only homeless need apply," would they get fined? Probably not. But if they said, "No homeless apply," they would be transient bigots. For as bureaucrats use language to punish the lawful, they use tolerance to coddle the troubled.
Greg Gutfeld
#48. Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of 'open government'; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.
Evgeny Morozov
#49. The lesson I learned in Cairo still applies. The only way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
#50. We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.
Kenzaburo Oe
#51. 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
#52. Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#53. 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
#54. What do oil company executives, vampires and NASA bureaucrats all have in common? They fear solar energy.
Michio Kaku
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Complete self-government for the province [gubernia and region], district and community through bureaucrats elected by universal suffrage; the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.
Vladimir Lenin
#62. 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
#63. We need more people to go into business and fewer wasting our lives becoming bureaucrats and civil servants.
Michael O'Leary
#64. I used to believe the government was the answer to all our problems. But the ... government, I've concluded, is now aninsufferable jungle of self-serving bureaucrats.
Chet Huntley
#65. 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
#66. Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear to end the debacle of putting the world's greatest care system in the hands of federal bureaucrats and putting those bureaucrats between an American citizen and her doctor.
Chris Christie
#67. Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.
Aaron Swartz
#68. Bureaucrats and politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with automatic routines in order to get rewards such as promotions or reelection.
Charles Duhigg
#69. Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.
Evan Osnos
#70. 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
#71. To reform the Secret Service, the agency needs a director from outside the agency who will be immune from that culture and not beholden to entrenched bureaucrats within the agency.
Ronald Kessler
#72. Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.
Milton Friedman
#73. More harm was done in the 20th century by faceless bureaucrats than tyrant dictators.
Dennis Prager
#74. The SAG was a strange three-legged beast equipped by civilian bureaucrats, administered by the police and staffed by the army.
Sandeep Unnithan
#75. When I'm president of the United States, we're going to have a VA that cares more about our veterans than about the bureaucrats who work at the VA.
Marco Rubio
#76. The "allies" of today would be the bureaucrats of tomorrow ...
Albert Meltzer
#77. Our view is that individuals and families can govern their lives better than bureaucrats.
Rick Perry
#78. Somehow we must reintegrate the scientific with the popular and reconnect the future to the present. This is less a job for scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and administrators and more a job for novelists, moviemakers, popularizers, and politicians.
Newt Gingrich
#79. I don't believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not. And I don't believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care of not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives.
Mitt Romney
#80. Everything passes through the eyes of top bureaucrats who closely watch to ensure that no intruder can enter their ranks and disrupt the order and arrangement of values in which everything is predetermined and where everyone knows their place, everyone's potential, talent and position in history.
Dejan Stojanovic
#81. They think that successful diplomacy requires years of experience and an understanding of all the nuances that have to be carefully considered before reaching a conclusion. Only then do these pinstriped bureaucrats consider taking action.
Donald J. Trump
#82. Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.
Alvin Toffler
#83. 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
#84. Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures.
Ludwig Von Mises
#85. Nothing is worse, or more of a breach of the social contract between citizen and state, than for government officials, bureaucrats and agencies to waste the money entrusted to them by the people they serve.
Bob Riley
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. The difference between management and administration (which is what bureaucrats used to do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity.
Robert Heller
#89. It's important to realize that whenever you give power to politicians or bureaucrats, it will be used for what they want, not for what you want.
Harry Browne
#90. A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it ...
Thomas Pynchon
#91. 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
#92. It is infinitely better to rely on the pursuit of economic interest by landowners or street companies than to depend on the dubious "altruism" of bureaucrats and government officials.
Murray N. Rothbard
#93. If the Congress is going to spend its whole time hauling up regulators and bureaucrats and looking like they're focusing on tiny, trivial things, instead of jobs and the economy, it could be a problem for them.
Mara Liasson
#94. Bureaucrats live on the fat of the land, while the rest of us stay skinny laboring to pay their salaries.
Charles E. McKenzie
#95. I believe when hard-working citizens have earned their pension, it's wrong for Washington bureaucrats and politicians to take their pensions away.
Josh Mandel
#96. 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
#97. When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.
Henry Hazlitt
#98. You can't fix a fundamentally broken law; you've got to replace it. That's why Congress can't save Obamacare with a few tweaks, despite what its defenders say. No quick fix can correct the main flaw: The law takes power away from patients and hands it to bureaucrats ...
Paul Ryan
#99. 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
#100. I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends.
Curt Weldon
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