Bureaucrats & Bureaucracies Quotes

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept..

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government job.

Every department in Washington…contained numerous traitors and spies.

I don't think they [Congress] ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor.

Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.

The main thing is the ‘rule of corruption’: helping the horse both to race and also to get a mouthful of hay. It’s what all civil servants are secretly thinking. Our expectations for our civil servants are far too high, far too grandiose. The pressure is more than their flesh-and-blood bodies can stand.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Trotsky appeared later and after assembling Foreign Office force, announced himself Minister for Foreign Affairs whereupon entire force declined to serve and left department which is now closed, not even responding to telephone calls. Only department responding to telephone is Ways of Communication but Minister of Ways of Communication imprisoned.

I am convinced that there are more threats to American liberty within the 10 mile radius of my office on Capitol Hill than there are on the rest of the globe.

A back channel is a means of communications between two heads of state without going through their respective bureaucracies thus preventing resistance and leaks.

Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.

With bad laws and good civil servants it's still possible to govern. But with bad civil servants even the best laws can't help.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

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

Evaluations, in essence, are … ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

To safeguard the people's money what we call red tape is tied around all government activity until the really efficient honest public servant has a somewhat difficult time, but we are still laboring under the theory that the majority of the world is dishonest.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Congress does investigations better than they do any thing else. Let them do that…. The people of Louisiana don’t want anyone’s head. They want everyone’s help.

I have never been a believer that serious government problems are solved by reorganization or shifting around bureaucracy.

There’s a mayor and a council and judges—a hundred men to deal with … and you can’t do business with a lot of officials, who check and cross one another and who come and go …. A business man wants to do business with one man.

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.