When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then its time to go.
Explaining his resignation as CIA Director
When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'
Bureaucracies tend to grow and to brag about their growth based on how many individuals they have and how much money they spend.
You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.
Bureaucrats sometimes do not have the correct information, while citizens and users of resources do.
The first time I went to the Planning Commission was when it was under KC Pant, a long time ago. Since then I have been back there many, many times to the point where the many people who seem to spend their lives sitting outside the various offices and even the patches of grime in the hallways and stairwells began to look familiar.
Anybody who has watched government from the inside recognizes that governments need institutions, need ways to respond to crises.
You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.
Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.
All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording, and ciphering. Thus, he declares that accounting and control are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society. . . . Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory.
I understand that bureaucracy, hierarchy and managing politics is not easy.
It can take a long time to get the rules in place that are conducive to growing, sometimes.
Only with our government are you given a certificate at birth, a license at marriage, and a bill at death.
I like studios. I just don't like bureaucracies.
You can't fight City Hall. It keeps changing its name.
If you are really interested in making government work, you should have the experience of working in government.
It's a whole different attitude toward public service than it once was. I tell you, we can all sit around in our old age and moan about it, but I think the administrative processes and the management effectiveness of the federal government are terrible!
[Describing himself:] ... a redtape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.
Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.