Connie Willis Quotes

The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself.

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.

I can see how paperwork and foolishness can destroy something.

Paperwork will ruin any military force.

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.

A hospital ought to be a house of healing, not a monument to paperwork and bureaucracy.

I ... can sniff out a bureaucracy when I see it coming [in new legislation.]

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

One thing the United Nation is good at is producing documents.

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

Superfluous bureaucracies and the system of file-keeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced by them … are totally alien to Islam

Our two greatest problems are gravity and paper work. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

Bureaucracy is more people doing less things, and taking more time to do them worse.

And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

God, it stinks,” I said, hand over my nose as he pulled me into a long step. Al strode forward, head high. “It’s the stench of bureaucracy, my itchy-witch, and why I chose to go into human resources when but a wee lad.

Most hierarchies are nowadays so cumbered with rules and traditions, and so bound in by public laws, that even high employees do not have to lead anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction and setting the pace. They simply follow precedents, obey regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. Such employees lead only in the sense that the curved wooden figurehead leads the ship .