bureaucratic challenges Quotes

The civil list is so large that a personal knowledge of any large number of the applicants is impossible. The President must rely upon the representations of others, and these are often made inconsiderately and without any just sense of responsibility.

My CIA colleagues were smart, dedicated, funny, and creative. Yes, there was sometimes stifling bureaucracy, boredom, colleagues who never should have been there, and later, deeply disturbing stories of the CIA's involvement in torture. Still, I got to do work I thought was incredibly important and, many times, had fun doing it.

Despite the reams of paperwork, obstacles worthy of a horse show, and a wait that can rival an elephant's gestation, adoption feels no different on the inside.

Trying to make things work in government is sometimes like trying to sew a button on a custard pie.

But the Air Force was sort of a bastard child of the Army, much like the Marines with the Navy. Everything had to be done over by the Army after it had already been done by the Air Corps, a mess.

The customs of the [Khmer] barbarians are so different from our own that even if we were to capture all their territory, it would not be certain that we could change them.

What most surprises me about Brazil is the extent of the difficulties that we create for ourselves. We create a lot of legislation to control the Brazilian state itself, that this ends up meaning that things don't go with the speed any head of government would like.

This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine, despite the fact that I can't get my cabinet approved, and they're outstanding people.

What struck me more than anything is how the people that are involved in government start out from a place of really wanting to do well, no matter what kind of political spectrum they're on, how they have to hold onto that warm fuzzy place in their heart while they're stuck in the machine.

Later the Administration wanted me to actually sell all remaining surplus by running the War Assets Corporation. I said I couldn't do it without some shoe leather.

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two.

We both got caught on making a bureaucracy work on things that were much bigger than that which they had ever worked on.

Managing the United Nations is like trying to run a business with 184 chief executive officers—each with a different language, a distinct set of priorities, and an unemployed brother-in-law seeking a paycheck.

It's very complicated when you are reorganizing territories under different ministries. We have to get them all together and transfer jurisdictions. It's a bureaucratic slalom course we have to ski through, but it can be done.

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two. There's no way of reading a situation and saying, "Yes, that'll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we'll be able to buy off." It just depends on the day, apparently.

Sometimes I feel like there isn't enough Prozac in the world to make Environmental Protection Agency people feel better about their jobs. They're going out there, they're trying to protect Americans and then time and time and time again they get their knees cut off at the policy level.

I left the government because I saw the only way to get family planning moving, was to do it outside the government. I was never disillusioned with government.

It would be Goddamned easy to run this office if you didn’t have to deal with people.