188 Quotes About Bureaucracy

An "attack on SeaWorld" might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two.

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.

To him, one of the most fascinating historical aspects of governments was their complete disregard for governing. Governments were single-minded and interested only in increasing their control and any governance that came out of the government's actions were purely coincidental. .... The lowest flunky as well as the most powerful bureaucrat was more interested in protecting his sinecure than in helping the citizens who coughed up tax money to pay the government worker's salaries.

Any sensible government must learn to unleash the energy of its people and get them to perform instead of trying to get a bureaucracy to perform.

for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.

A healthy agency does not require relevance to the national agenda so much as the APPEARANCE of relevance to the national agenda," Humphrey explained. "It is perhaps the second-most important tool in ensuring continued funding.""And the most important?""A friend on the Appropriations committee.

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

Diplomatic exchange combined the worst aspects of explaining things to a toddler and talking with a mother-in-law. It was dull, it was tedious, it was exasperating, and it was necessary.

You know you're in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think 'A' get together and compromise on 'B.