Bureaucracy Quotes

Donald Trump is going to win. Donald Trump is going to win because in the end, the country is not going to reward big banks and big unions and big bureaucracies and big donors and big corruption by voting for a big liar.

For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

The power of the corporate bureaucracy - the power of technostructure (a term that did not take off) - is something to which I still adhere.

Leaks are good. There is too much secrecy in our government. Sometimes the government knows about a problem and it takes a leak to embarrass the bureaucracy and get them to do something about it.

Things there are no solution to: Inflation, bureaucracy & dandruff.

I do not rule Russia: ten thousand clerks do.

A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of every paper before he destroys it.

I think what's happening is companies are trying to maximize shareholder value and I think they realized that if they could hire more effectively, they would. What I'm suggesting, though, is that human resources departments in most companies have become so detached - have become such a bureaucracy - that they have become clueless. They don't realize that the processes they have put in place have very little to do with recruiting, retaining and bringing on talent.

We need to get rid of all remnants of bureaucracy and bureaucratic thinking, and start thinking like entrepreneurs again.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

Trump conducts meetings and actually tries to get something done rather than just have the meeting and rather than just announce a framework and rather than just touch on bullet points or outline points and to speak in large terms about what our four-year objectives are. My guess is that Trump gets in there, rolls up the sleeves, and starts talking about actual work that's going to be done, things that he wants to do, things he believes the American people elected him to do. And I think it probably is a stark contrast for people who basically work in a bureaucracy.

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow. When innovations are in the exploration stage, they need a champion to take them through the rest of the developmental stages. Otherwise the bureaucracy, politics, and people who can only see the fledgling and potential innovation through today's glasses will smother it or let it quietly die from malnourishment.

The Germans now seem the primary example of this [institutional-maintenance type] - which is another reason to scratch the head at their seeming determination to force the whole Church to adopt the Catholic Lite approach that has, in a bizarre inversion, emptied German churches of congregants while vastly expanding the German Church's bureaucracies.

I think there's definitely billions and billions in waste, fraud and abuse. There's billions that can be generated in the economy by eliminating the bureaucracy.

In fact, the private sector is improving their algorithmic ability to search through big data month after month after month. And, of course, a big government bureaucracy isn't keeping up.

I have an institutional fear of big government. I have an institutional opposition to bureaucracy.

You can't be for big government, big taxes and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy.

Combination does not produce though mergers and combinations are still the accepted panacea. In Big business there appears to be increasing aridity, bureaucracy, and stultifying sacrifice of initiative and above all fear.

Despite the campaign rhetoric, the bureaucracies-big business and big government-are here to stay. The centralization effort cannot be checked. but it can be rationally directed towards our species goal: Space Migration, which in turn offers the only way to re-attain individual freedom of space-time and the small-group social structures which obviously best suit our nervous systems. It is another paradox of neuro-genetics that only in space habitats can humanity return to the village life and pastoral style for which we all long.

I like to think of my best moment on the job as quiet victories. Victories over what? Over the "system", over the various bureaucracies not watching me, over my colleagues' indifference, over my patron's ignorance, over the very concept of horn-blowing pride.

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.

Britain has invented a new missile. It's called the civil servant - it doesn't work and it can't be fired.

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true.

I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef.

The Green Party provides the infrastructure, kind of the culture of watchdogging the electoral bureaucracy, and how you participate, how you get on the ballot, stuff like that which is very difficult to do unless you have billions of dollars.

We believe in a free Europe, not a standardised Europe. Diminish that variety within the member states, and you impoverish the whole Community. We insist that the institutions of the European Community are managed so that they increase the liberty of the individual throughout the continent. These institutions must not be permitted to dwindle into bureaucracy. Whenever they fail to enlarge freedom the institutions should be criticised and the balance restored.

Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need.

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.

Without general elections, without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, without the free battle of opinions, life in every public institution withers away, becomes a caricature of itself, and bureaucracy rises as the only deciding factor.

One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North--personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare. (A Carnegie or a Ford, like a bureaucracy, molds the lives of millions without taking any responsibility.)

The oppression of it, the sense of helplessness, and really being part of a system and a bureaucracy that is arbitrary. I never thought of the depth of losing your freedom and what that meant. And I was surprised and delighted by ways people maintain their humanity and try to survive.

You see the kind of approach, because he [Doanld Trump] is a businessman. He's like, I'm going to pick up the phone, I'm gonna call that CEO and we're going to talk about this directly, instead of getting mired in a lot of the way down, you know, bureaucracy and red tape and having 25 assistants or deputies talk to somebody instead of going directly to the root of the problem.

What do intellectuals and opinion makers get from big government? An increasing number of cushy jobs in the bureaucracy, or in the government-subsidized sector, staffing the welfare regulatory state, and apologizing for its policies, as well as propagandizing for them among the public. To put it bluntly, intellectuals, theorists, pundits, media elites, etc. get to live a life which they could not attain on the free market, but which they can gain at taxpayer expense.

Today we know that centralization and big bureaucracies have not, as promised, been the answer for promoting better opportunities for society.

As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed. At first there were laws. Then there were decrees implementing laws. Then a law was made saying, ‘There shall be no laws.’ Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes. Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers. Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral. And finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do.

In our time ... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.

The American political system is a giant bureaucracy.

The new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.

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.

The State is a collection of officials, different for difference purposes, drawing comfortable incomes so long as the status quo is preserved. The only alteration they are likely to desire in the status quo is an increase of bureaucracy and the power of bureaucrats.

We are for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration-for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington-even with Truman at the reins of it all.

No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.

We need to do a top/bottom review of the federal government and for every agency administration bureaucracy that is not called for in the United States Constitution, we have to really ask the question what is its purpose, how many people work there, how much does it cost the taxpayers and what is the value to our society.

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shootings of hostages, etc.

Temporary teams of trusted people are generally sent to all Departments and to major agencies of government to assist in planning and to acquaint the incoming administration with the civil servants and bureaucracy that will remain in place in the new Administration.

When the fountains of government [borrowing] abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to public works, then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world.

This thought-provoking novel portrays the absurdity of our overbearing government bureaucracy with a story that is entertaining and fast-paced. The Taxman Cometh will become part of our national dialogue about taxes and freedom. And it’s funny as hell. Author Jim Greenfield is a cross between Ayn Rand and Monty Python. If enough people read this hilarious ‘man versus state’ book, the IRS will be put out of business, which is okay with me.

The great successes of the modern environmental movement in the '60s and '70s had laid the seeds of their failure in the early years of the 21st Century. They had built institutions filled with lawyers and scientists well suited to lobby policy makers who basically shared their world view. This worked well when liberals controlled the Congress and much of the federal bureaucracy, and when the politics of the time were more supportive of active government efforts to regulate the economy and clean up the environment.