Neil Postman Quotes

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

Almost everything the government runs becomes mediocre in time ... bureaucracy leads to mediocrity.

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.

Getting the U. S. Government to do anything is like herding ducks with a broom.

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

We'll always have bureaucracies, but bureaucracies led by bureaucrats might be too much of a bad thing.

Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

The perfect bureaucrat … is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.

A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than leave free the energies of mankind.

If everyone in government would refuse to sign everything they couldn't read, everything would grind to a screeching halt.

There’s a mayor and a council and judges—a hundred men to deal with … and you can’t do business with a lot of officials, who check and cross one another and who come and go …. A business man wants to do business with one man.

Governments are not like a business. They don’t look like a business, work like a business, think like a business, and they don’t have a bottom line.

The Navajo Nation spends most of its time jumping through hoops.

It is a huge bureaucracy. It is so inept. But it does function.

The War Office is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be entirely negated by all his sub-departments, and those of each of the sub-departments by every other.

The major functions of the government are … operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

I want you to cut through red tape. I want you to cut through bureaucracy. There is no excuse for inaction at this point.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

To safeguard the people's money what we call red tape is tied around all government activity until the really efficient honest public servant has a somewhat difficult time, but we are still laboring under the theory that the majority of the world is dishonest.