188 Quotes About Bureaucracy

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic--love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.

Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]

The NSA?""Yeah, they called and offered to help out. Same software they use for enhancing spy satellite imagery."Venkat shrugged. "It's amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone's rooting for one man to survive.

Hell was hot and full of unkind people in a hurry; there was far too much red tape; and the bureaucrats were all shockingly corrupt.

The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth.

State first, subject second, statesman last.

People and institutions that refuse to admit error eventually discredit themselves.

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