188 Quotes About Bureaucracy

Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest to keep from having to read a two-foot stack of cables every morning.

The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.

The first law of bureaucracy is to guarantee its own continuance.

Good general differ from bad generals only in the degree to which they resist the psychopathology of the very organization they serve. Norman Dixon

Organised religion is a contradiction in terms - it's the fallible meeting the infallible. Any earthly, bureaucratic representation of a higher power will prove to be inherently problematic.

Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it’s an almost losing battle against it.

Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to.

It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey.

In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.