188 Quotes About Bureaucracy

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices.

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy, God will forgive you but the bureaucracy.

Department policy was to accept unsolicited gifts under twenty bucks—it was a cultural thing in a lot of places, and refusal could offend—and then fill in the requisite forms in triplicate back in the office.

The two terms of the democratic alternative today—oppressive bureaucracy or repugnant plutocracy—are canceling each other out.Combining into a single term: opulent bureaucracy.At once repugnant and oppressive.

...sometimes we see things in animals that aren't really there. It's called transference, if that makes any sense. ...I think there are a lot of people who say they do things for animals when they're really doing it for themselves. They see things in animals that might not really be there. I think sometimes that hurts the animals in the end, and it hurts other people, too....There are people on both sides of the issue who think animals are more valuable than people are...

The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.

To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.