BUREAUCRACY QUOTES
quotations about bureaucracy
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
EUGENE MCCARTHY
Time Magazine, February 12, 1979
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
FRANZ KAFKA
attributed, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
A bureaucrat is an official who is clothed with power and whom it doesn't fit.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
The knock of bureaucracy on the door of politics announces: Hi, I'm bureaucracy, I'm your replacement. Where bureaucracy takes over, politics dies. Oh, it may seem at first that bureaucracy is a wonderful tool for the one who controls it, but the "tool" soon develops what seems like a mind of its own. And given its characteristic traits--all focused on rational and machine-like operation standards--that turn is inevitable: modern organization replaces human beings.
RALPH P. HUMMEL
The Bureaucratic Experience
The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
BROOKS ATKINSON
Once Around the Sun
Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
LEON TROTSKY
The Revolution Betrayed
Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them.
P.J. O'ROURKE
All the Trouble in the World
Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.
KOLLONTAI ALEXANDRA
La Oposición Obrera
The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general and so all are mutually deceived.
KARL MARX
Collected Works
There comes a time in the history of all bureaucracies when they must inevitably parody their own functions.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Isle of the Dead
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.
CHAIM POTOK
Davita's Harp
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
The Worst Years of Our Lives
You know you're in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think 'A' get together and compromise on 'B'.
SCOTT ADAMS
Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons
Guidelines for Bureaucrats: 1) When in charge, ponder. 2) When in trouble, delegate. 3) When in doubt, mumble.
JAMES BOREN
When in Doubt, Mumble: A Bureaucrat's Handbook
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
MARY MCCARTHY
"The Vita Activa,", The New Yorker, Oct. 18, 1958
A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and rigorous precision, which seemed to say, though everything is done with much silence, "Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state."
MARQUIS DE CUSTINE
Empire of the Czar
The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
The bureaucracy is the most dangerously hidebound and conservative force; if it ends up by constituting a compact body, which stands on its own and feels itself independent of the mass of members, the party ends up by becoming anachronist and at moments of acute crisis it is voided of its social content and left as though suspended in mid-air.
ANTONIO GRAMSCI
Selections from Prison Notebooks
Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts.
HERBERT HOOVER
campaign speech in New York, October 22, 1928
Remove the document--and you remove the man.
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita