Ambrose Bierce Quotes

If the Board of Trade or Local Government Board managed their business after the fashion of the Foreign Office and Colonial Office, you and I should deserve to be hung.

News flash: The federal government is not the most efficient institution in the world. Taxpayers know that.

The government - they're completely useless.

Government screws up.

It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.

The ship of state is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

We have this idea of bureaucracy in local government, and it's generally things that we're frustrated at. It doesn't work the way we like it to work.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

A government is the only vessel that leaks from the top.

I think governments are the cancer of civilization.

Everything government touches turns to crap.

Things happened there that I don't think are the finest hours for anybody, whether it was a journalist, the legal system or, in that case of the political system, who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

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.

The government generally is just too top-heavy.

I used to work for a succession of software editing companies that would have contracts with state and federal agencies. And I would be the documenter of meetings, sometimes doing limited business analysis. I began to become quite cynical about how the world works. It works on ineptitude and inefficiency and a kind of passiveness.

Government on its own is always inefficient.

I thought I was going to go into politics, but that became disheartening. You see that a lot of stuff doesn't get done, people walk around all self-important, and it's just depressing.

Whether you're a veteran or a millennial, it's hard to argue that big government has solved your problems efficiently, if at all.

There’s enough fat in the federal government that if you rendered it, you could wash the world.

The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.

Huge organizations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.

Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks.

People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.