Best 210 quotes in «bureaucracy quotes» category

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.

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.

To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.

Truman said he only needed a daily intelligence digest to keep from having to read a two-foot stack of cables every morning.

Two more [birds added to her cage]. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!?" - - - Miss Flite to Esther. [I thought a the last two a bit strange until I looked and saw the old definitions of gammon (as being double talk or obfuscation) and spinach (as being a spurious and unwanted growth). How appropriately summarized the situation!

Ukiipenda sana nchi yako ni rahisi sana kuichukia serikali yake!

Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the "reasonable person" standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34

Until recently, attempts to resolve the contradictions created by urbanization, centralization, bureaucratic growth and statification were viewed as a vain counterdrift to "progress"—a counterdrift that could be dismissed as chimerical and reactionary. The anarchist was regarded as a forlorn visionary, a social outcast, filled with nostalgia for the peasant village or the medieval commune. His yearnings for a decentralized society and for a humanistic community at one with nature and the needs of the individual—the spontaneous individual, unfettered by authority—were viewed as the reactions of a romantic, of a declassed craftsman or an intellectual "misfit." His protest against centralization and statification seemed all the less persuasive because it was supported primarily by ethical considerations—by Utopian, ostensibly "unrealistic," notions of what man could be, not by what he was. In response to this protest, opponents of anarchist thought—liberals, rightists and authoritarian "leftists"—argued that they were the voices of historic reality, that their statist and centralist notions were rooted in the objective, practical world. Time is not very kind to the conflict of ideas. Whatever may have been the validity of libertarian and non-libertarian views a few years ago, historical development has rendered virtually all objections to anarchist thought meaningless today. The modern city and state, the massive coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, the later, more rationalized, systems of mass production and assembly-line systems of labor organization, the centralized nation, the state and its bureaucratic apparatus—all have reached their limits. Whatever progressive or liberatory role they may have possessed, they have now become entirely regressive and oppressive. They are regressive not only because they erode the human spirit and drain the community of all its cohesiveness, solidarity and ethico-cultural standards; they are regressive from an objective standpoint, from an ecological standpoint. For they undermine not only the human spirit and the human community but also the viability of the planet and all living things on it.

War is a cauldron that softens bureaucracy and expedites the formation of formidable reputations.

Wananchi wanapokosa huduma za muhimu za kijamii (kama vile afya, elimu, chakula, malazi, na ulinzi) ilhali wanalipa kodi, na wameajiri serikali kuwaendeshea nchi kwa kiapo cha uaminifu wa vitabu vitakatifu, watakosa imani na serikali yao! Vilevile wataathirika kiuchumi, kijamii na kisiasa, na vita itaweza kutokea kati ya wananchi na serikali, au wananchi kwa wananchi wataweza hata kujidhuru wenyewe – nikimaanisha vita ya wenyewe kwa wenyewe. Serikali ikifuata maadili ya kazi, na kuacha udikteta na urasimu wa aina yoyote ile, au ikifanya kazi kulingana na misingi ya katiba ya nchi; wananchi watapata huduma za kijamii kama wanavyostahili, na ndoto ya haki na ustawi wa jamii itaweza kutimia. Hata hivyo, serikali inaweza kuwadhulumu wananchi wake kwa sababu ya usalama wao.

Weber also saw that a bureaucratic world contained risks. It produced increasingly powerful and autonomous bureaucrats who could be spiritless, driven only by impersonal rules and procedures, and with little regard for the people they were expected to serve. Weber famously warned that those who allow themselves to be guided by rules will soon find that those rules have defined their identities and commitments.

We decided to go back to basics and put the frighteners on some snouts." "Really?" "We adopted a proactive intelligence-gathering policy utilising appropriate stakeholders in the community and pre-established covert human intelligence sources. "And nobody can put a frightener on a covert human quite like Lesley can.

We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.

A bureaucrat is an official who is clothed with power and whom it doesn't fit.

What drives me is the fear of forgetting the stories. I don't feel threatened, it's the stories that are threatened: I see a darkness preparing to fall upon them. Write ... write, I say to myself, or everything will whirl into forgetfulness. Write so the thread won't be severed ... a thousand stories are too few. So the flow won't be broken, so the lamps over the desks won't go out. Write, or you'll be without a past, nothing but a will-less plaything of bureaucracy. You'll lie stored in their databases, retrievable, a calculation, an accounting factor, just part of a sum whose loss was factored in from the beginning ... you'll be cannon fodder.

what passed for useful information sharing within an organization was really just bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for upcoming failures and calamities, that were both entirely predictable, but seemingly completely unavoidable and telling each other what they all already knew. The trick was to be able to reengage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know that you stopped listening properly, shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.

You know, when you see something from the inside, you see all the corruption.

A cardinal rule of bureaucracy is that it is better to extend an error than to admit a mistake.

We . . . go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting.

What is all this? Get him out of here, devil take me!” And that one, imagine, smiles and says: “Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!” And—bang!

Wie es im Zeitalter der Könige naiv gewesen wäre zu glauben, dass der erstgeborene Königssohn der zum Herrschen Geeignetste wäre, so ist es in unserer zeit naiv zu glauben, dass der demokratisch gewählte Machthaber der Geeignetste sein wird. Die Nachfolgeregelung ist kein Rezept für die Bestimmung des besten Machthabers, sie ist ein Rezept für die Legitimierung dieser oder jener Person und somit für die Vermeidung von Bürgerkriegen. Die Wählerschaft - der Demos - glaubt, es sei ihre Aufgabe, den Besten auszuwählen, doch in Wahrheit ist ihre Aufgabe viel schlichter: einen Mann zu salben [...], gleichgültig welchen.

With the potentially disruptive issue of the role of Islam in the state temporarily out of the way, the praetorian guard and its mandarin friends sanguinely accepted the constituent assembly’s stance on fundamental rights. As they knew only too well, the proof of the pudding lay in the eating.

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

Younger managers learn quickly that, whatever the public protestations to the contrary, bosses generally want pliable and agreeable subordinates, especially during periods of crisis. Clique leaders want dependable, loyal allies. Thos who regularly raise objections to what a boss or a clique leader really desires run the risk of being considered problems themselves and of being labeled "outspoken," or "nonconstructive," or "doomsayers," "naysayers," or "crepehangers.

America isn't Wollman Rink, but I think almost everybody watching, and certainly the people who voted for him, have had frustrating experiences with bureaucrats and bureaucracy, private as well as public, pushing them around.

An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception.

An official man is always an official man, and has a wild belief in the value of Reports.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

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

Bureaucracy is adept at protecting its nest.

Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.

Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Bureaucracy is more people doing less things, and taking more time to do them worse.

Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.

Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind.

Communism is what happens when atheism meets bureaucracy.

Entrenched bureaucracies are always opposed to fundamental changes.

Congress is supposed to fund the IRS, and it has been steadily reducing the number of auditors and tax collectors the IRS has at the very time that the tax system has become vastly more complicated. And of course America continues to grow, so there's an increasing number of tax returns coming in. The IRS responds by doing exactly what Congress expects of them. That shouldn't surprise anyone. All bureaucracies do what they are told.

French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks.

How come there's only one Monopolies Commission?

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

I do not rule Russia: ten thousand clerks do.

I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.