Best 210 quotes in «bureaucracy quotes» category

When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!

A bureaucrat who said no to everything rarely got in trouble.

Yet the proletariat has not only a vanguard, but also a rearguard, and besides the proletariat there are the peasantry and the bureaucracy.

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

67–If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry of another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you're given something to do that is time-consuming, takes you out of yourself, is mildly painful, forces you into close proximity with strangers, and ends, usually, with a surprising rush of exhilaration: 'Hey, I did it.' Every French ministry is, like a Nautilus machine, thoughtfully designed to provide maximum possible resistance to your efforts, only to give way just at the moment of total mental failure. Parisians emerge from the government buildings on the île de la Cité feeling just the way New Yorkers do after a good workout: aching and exhausted and on top of the world.

After the loss of its eastern wing, which became Bangladesh in 1971, Pakistan has been completely dominated by one ethnic group, the Punjabis, who tend to favour the ideological model for Pakistan and are heavily represented in the military, the media and the bureaucracy.

After Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France, and as Hegel had prescribed, with every house numbered so that bureaucratic government could pass its science to and collect sustenance from each. The states became the purveyors of education and sources of authority. They fostered the myth that people within their borders formed distinct races with different geniuses and destinies. All partook of Charles Darwin's ideology that life is an evolutionary struggle in which the fittest survive.

All such questions as, for instance,of the cause of failure of crops, of the adherence of certain tribes to their ancient belief, etc.--questions which, but for the convenient intervention of the official machine are not, and cannot be solved for ages--received full, unhesitating solution.

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.

All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.

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.

As a result, amongst working-class Americans, government is now generally seen as being made up of two sorts of people: "politicians," who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and "bureaucrats," who are condescending elitists almost impossible to uproot.

A new, more efficient system was to be put in place, although, as with so many other such initiatives, it would later be revealed that it was less efficient and more costly than the original.

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.

A slightly different version of the argument--this is really the core of Max Weber's reflections on the subject--is that a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolize access to certain key types of information.

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

As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and build walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don't need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on.

A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness.  Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.

Bureaucracy is never there if you need it

bureaucracy was very rarely an obstruction, provided that one applied to it the insights of ordinary, everyday psychology

Bureaucracies public and private appear--for whatever historical reasons--to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It's in this sense that I've said one can fairly say that bureaucracies are utopian forms of organization. After all, is this not what we always say of utopians: that they have a naive faith in the perfectibility of human nature and refuse to deal with humans as they actually are? Which is, are we not also told, what leads them to set impossible standards and then blame the individuals for not living up to them?

Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor described in the first essay in this book, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you're dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse.

Bureaucrats do not take kindly to intercessions. Their one satisfaction in life is to keep us waiting in line, begging for that last signature.

Business is boss, politics is servant.

At one point I learned that when I'd told them my college coursework in Arabic might make me a good intelligence officer, they had recorded that my minor at Harvard had been in aerobics.

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized', the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.

Bureaucratic categories and organizational boxes do more than simply separate relevant from irrelevant information. They also produce the social optics that policymakers and bureaucrats use to see the world. Before policymakers can act, they first must come to create a definition and understanding of the situation, and that understanding is mediated by how the institution is organized to think. ...How organizations categorize and carve up the world has a profound impact on how policymakers see the world.

Bureaucracy progresses at its own pace. That is to say, slowly.

Bureaucrats and Politicians are different people, work of Bureaucrats makes us hate Politicians.

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof they were busy.

But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.

Den Staat kümmert nicht, ob der Bürger lebt oder stirbt. Wichtig für den Staat und sein Archiv ist, ob der Bürger am Leben oder tot ist.

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.

Corrupt corporate governments employ corrupt bureaucrats that enact corrupt policies.

But who would build the roads if there were no government? You mean to tell me that 300 million people in this country and 7 billion people on the planet would just sit around in their houses and think “Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can't because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here then we could do it. If they were here to boss us around and steal our money and really inefficiently build the flat places, then we would be set. Then I would be comfortable and confident that I could get places. But I can’t go to Fred’s house or the market because we can’t possibly build a flat space from A to B. We can make these really small devices that enable us to contact people from all over the word that fits in our pockets; we can make machines that we drive around in, but no, we can’t possibly build a flat space.

Christian preachers [...] were intransigent. They, they said, were answerable to a higher power than the mere law of the land. Their eye was upon heaven. As they reminded their flocks, it was not the law of some imperial bureaucrat that mattered. It was the law of God. Anything that saved a soul – even if it did so at the expense of law, order or even the body that that soul inhabited – was an acceptable act. To attack the houses, bodies and temples of those afflicted by the ‘pagan error’ was not to harm these sinners but to help them. This was not brutality. This was kindness, education, reformation.

Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves. ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.

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.

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.

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

Except in Punjab and the NWFP, the central government’s Kashmir policy had little support in Sindh or Balochistan and even less in East Bengal. Instead of serving the people, civil servants and their allies in the army hoisted the political leaders with their Kashmir petard to become the veritable masters of the manor through autocratic and unconstitutional means.

For all the scientific evidence we were amassing, many people, both in government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening. I wasn't the only voice screaming in the wilderness anymore - but still, not everyone heard the call. In those first few years, it was a long uphill battle to get people to recognize what was happening.

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.

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

How can you make sense of a place if it won't hold still to be counted and even its colors aren't fast? Their job was to imagine, never to know. The truth, as generations of directors had reminded their charges, would only get in the way.

Hitler's unusually improvisational and personal style of leadership, which created constant responsibility conflicts and an anarchic tangle of offices and portfolios, was anything but an expression of political incompetence. On the contrary, it served to make Hitler's own supremacy essentially unassailable.

Ho sentito la gomma svuiccare.» «Prego?» intervenne Moroder, che stava battendo il verbale al computer. «Sì, insomma fare svuic.» «… E il suddetto motociclo emetteva un suono prodotto dallo sdrucciolamento repentino della gomma posteriore sulla superficie viabile…» tradusse Moroder in clinico burocratese.

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.

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