quotations about bureaucracy
I did not know that bureaucracy could send its claws into our very coffins.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
History of the Thirteen
What a marvel bureaucracy is, which can smother
Such quite elementary feelings, and tag
A man with a number, and set him to wag
His legs and his arms at the word of command
Or the blow of a whistle! He's certainly damned,
Fit only for mince-meat, if a little gold lace
And an upturned moustache can set him to face
Bullets, and bayonets, and death, and diseases,
Because some one he calls his Emperor, pleases.
AMY LOWELL
Men, Women and Ghosts
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.
WOLFGANG HILBIG
The Tidings of the Trees
Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relation with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.
ALAN KEYES
attributed, Public Administration: An Introduction
I hated the maze of bureaucracy with a passion, but I've found the best way to deal with it is to smile and act stupid.
KIM HARRISON
Dead Witch Walking
It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Bureaucracy is more people doing less things, and taking more time to do them worse.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy, but an inevitable complement to it.
JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER
Capitalism
Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Good Society
My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C.S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
No one comes or stays in the government offices but idlers, incapables, or fools. Thus the mediocrity of French administration has slowly come about. Bureaucracy, made up entirely of petty minds, stands as an obstacle of prosperity of the nation; delays for seven years, by its machinery, the project of a canal which would have stimulated the production of a province; is afraid of everything, prolongs procrastination, and perpetuates the abuses which in turn perpetuate and consolidate itself. Bureaucracy holds all things and the administration itself in leading strings; it stifles men of talent who are bold enough to be independent of it or to enlighten it on its own follies.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Les Employés
To participate in a bureaucracy is to know one's place in a system and how to advance in that system if one should choose to.
ROY GRUNDMANN
A Companion to Michael Haneke
We have a system laden with rules; elsewhere that is a sure sign that the bureaucracy is aloof from the people, distant from their concerns, and preoccupied with the power and privileges of the bureaucrats--an elaborate, grinding machine that can crush the spirit of any who dare oppose it. We also have a system suffused with participation: advisory boards, citizen groups, neighborhood councils, congressional investigators, crusading journalists, and lawyers serving writs; elsewhere this popular involvement would be taken as evidence that the administrative system is no system at all, but a bungling, jerry-built contraption wallowing in inefficiency and shot through with corruption and favoritism.
JAMES Q. WILSON
Bureaucracy
If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
HYMAN G. RICKOVER
attributed, Words from the Wise
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
GORE VIDAL
preface, Sex
Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
There was a point of equilibrium in any organization's middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it.
J. ZACHARY PIKE
Son of a Liche
Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus--the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.
SIMONE WEIL
"Reflections on War"
Bureaucracy is, for its detractors, one of the predicaments of modern life and must be examined as what it is, at best, a functional solution to administrative problems and, at worst, an immediate and living threat to the open society.
ALEXANDER STYHRE
The Innovative Bureaucracy
Not only does a bureaucracy thus tend to under-government, in point of quality; it tends to over-government, in point of quantity.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies