Bureaucracy Quotes - Page 16

• The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such.

  Simone Weil

  Giving, Evolution, Oppression

  Simone Weil (2013). “Oppression and Liberty”, p.13, Routledge

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• The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.

  Simone Weil

  Thinking, Branches, Speed

  Simone Weil (2013). “Oppression and Liberty”, p.13, Routledge

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• The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.

  Gertrude Stein

  Believe, Government, Interesting

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.61, Random House

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• the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.

  Hannah Arendt

  Political, Form, Known

  Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.251, Penguin

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• The civil servant is primarily the master of the short-term solution.

  Indira Gandhi

  Masters, Term, Servant

  Indira Gandhi (1975). “India: The Speeches and Reminiscences of Indira Gandhi”

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

  Hortense Calisher

  Clerks

  Hortense Calisher (2013). “Mysteries of Motion: A Novel”, p.70, Open Road Media

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• In government and out, there are vast realms of the bureaucracy dedicated to seeking more information, in perpetuity if need be, in order to avoid taking action.

  Meg Greenfield

  Government, Order, Needs

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• Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good deal more.

  Ouida

  Sweet, Clerks, Littles

  Ouida (2016). “Wisdom, Wit and Pathos of Ouida”, p.95, Ouida

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• Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: The Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor.

  Ronald Reagan

  Wisdom, Independent, Leader

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• All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Practice, Agency, Self

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• administrative purpose usually outruns the facts. Indeed the administrative official's ardor for facts usually begins when he wants to change the facts!

  Mary Parker Follett

  Purpose, Want, Facts

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• Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Outsiders, Inquiring, Hostile

  Martha Gellhorn (2015). “The View From The Ground”, p.313, Granta Books

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• In the bureaucracy, the identity of state interest and particular private aim is established in such a way that the state interest becomes a particular private aim over against other private aims.

  Karl Marx

  Identity, Way, States

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1975). “Collected works”

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• We have to make bureaucracy sexy.

  Jennifer Pahlka

  Sexy

  "Coding a better government". TED conference, www.ted.com. February 2012.

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• Rather than Surrender to Bureaucracy, take it upon yourself to break it

  Scott Belsky

  Surrender, Break

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• The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate.

  Simone Weil

  Civilization, Specialization, Whole

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• The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the gospel.

  Philip Berrigan

  Church, Majors

  Philip Berrigan, Fred Wilcox (1996). “Fighting the lamb's war: skirmishes with the American Empire : the autobiography of Philip Berrigan”, Common Courage Pr

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• The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.

  Atul Gawande

  Running, Government, Organization

  Atul Gawande (2010). “Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance”, p.37, Profile Books

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• They're on you day and night. Their oversight is just too extreme [. . .] That's why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn't stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you.

  Lee Iacocca

  Night, Government, Years

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• But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

  Manuel De Landa

  Information Processing, Decision, Events

  Manuel De Landa (1997). “A thousand years of nonlinear history”, Zone Books (NY)

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• In reality, we've had more spending, more bureaucracy, more waste and higher costs but without necessary reform nor rising productivity.

  Andrew Lansley

  Reality, Reform, Cost

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• 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.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  War, Army, Government

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• The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.

  Guy Debord

  Powerful, Class, Achievement

  Guy Debord (2014). “The Society of the Spectacle”, p.39, Bureau of Public Secrets

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• 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.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  War, Character, Fighting

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• Today the primary threat to the liberties of the American people comes not from communism, foreign tyrants or dictators. It comes from the tendency on our own shores to centralize power, to trust bureaucracies rather than people.

  George Allen

  Power, Tyrants, People

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