Marquis de Custine Quotes

We can get rid of red tape.

I'm communicating with the directors of the Soviet companies, and I see that it is wrong, but when I go to the official discussions, they discuss we should change the color of the walls.

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.

It is easier to waste time on bureaucratic reorganization than it is to accomplish anything concrete.

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.

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.

If you don't know what to do with many of the papers piled on your desk, stick a dozen colleagues initials on them and pass them along. When in doubt, route.

When we're worried about a bureaucracy and keeping the bureaucracy going, you're always going to make mistakes.

NASA, like every government organization, has some bureaucracy, which can become slimmer.

The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

Politicians in their hubris who believe they can ignore debt or wish it away are sorely disappointed - as we see now with the plummeting approval ratings of both the administration and Congress.

I believe we're all aware that there are people and organizations throughout the world who are bent on destroying America, everything we stand for and inflicting harm on American citizens. It is the obligation of the president of the United States to respond to those. I believe, I must add, that this adminstration for the last seven months has neglected compelling national security threats besides this ... I hope that the president will not confine his activities to just this.

We do not need committees but we need commitment. The nation is already reeling under the burden of several committees formed in the last decade.

The first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.

We are ready to meet [with Donald Trump] at any time, this is no problem for us, but I believe we should be patient and wait for the complicated process of forming the new administration to be complete.

Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.

I've been around the government system and believe me it's built to spend. You've got to change the system, otherwise it's like asking a cultivator to do what a combine does, it just doesn't fit, it won't get it done. You've got to change the system.

The velocity of decision making in government was extraordinary slow. It took 18 to 24 months and 15 to 20 trips to Delhi to get a license to import computers.

Some of this is bureaucratic ineptitude and a great deal of this is an administration that doesn't understand the urgency of the situation, and therefore this [Barack Obama] administration has not reached out actively to the private sector and said, we need help.

Sometimes I feel frustration at the bureaucracy for not moving fast enough to deliver in the way that I would prefer. But that is probably because I have worked for many years in the civil society, which tends to move much faster than government.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.