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Bureaucracy Quotes

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Bureaucracy Quotes

“Geriatric or other life extension for the powerful poses a similar threat to a sentient species as that found historically in the dominance of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Both assume prerogatives of immortality, collecting more and more power with each passing moment. This is power which draws a theological aura about itself: the unassailable Law, the God-given mandate of the leader, manifest destiny. Power held too long within a narrow framework moves farther and farther away from the adaptive demands of changed conditions. The leadership grows ever more paranoid, suspicious of inventive adaptations to change, fearfully protective of personal power and, in the terrified avoidance of what it sees as risk, blindly leads its people into destruction. ―BuSab Manual”

BureaucracyAdaptabilityRisk ManagementStagnationTheocracyConcentration Of Power
Book:The Dosadi Experiment
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“The jangling, dissonant sound of modern politics; the anger on cable television and the evening news; the fast pace of social media; the headlines that clash with one another when we scroll through them; the dullness, by contrast, of the bureaucracy and the courts; all of this has unnerved that part of the population that prefers unity and homogeneity. Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.”

PoliticsDemocracyMediaNewsAngerSocial MediaBeliefsBureaucracyConsensusCourts
Book:Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
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“The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.”

CapitalismBureaucracyFree MarketNeoliberalismStalinismLate CapitalismCapitalist Realism
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.”

ChildrenScienceKnowledgeYouthGeniusIntellectualSocial JusticeBrilliantGiftedBureaucracyBrillianceGood IntentionsSelf EducationIndoctrinationEducational SystemUnfairnessSocializationSad TruthEducation ReformGiftednessSimple TruthGifted PeopleAutodidacticismThe Road To Hell
Author:Christopher Langan
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“In a democracy government is the God.”

InspirationalWritingPhilosophyGodWisdomGovernmentMotivationalQuotesPoliticsLeaderKnowledgePowerDemocracyCivilizationRepublicanSpeechConstitutionElectionDemocraticAdministrationMovieStoryVotersRepublicRhetoricBureaucracyPoliticiansCreative WritingAmit KalantriAmit Kalantri QuotesPublic SpeakingProverbsElectionsSocial NetworkingBloggingCharactersAmit Kalantri WriterAdageNovel WritingBook WritingEssayScriptAdvertisementBlogMovie DialogueScript WritingCatchphrasesAlliterationsStatesmanshipTag LinesScriptwritingCatch LinesSpeechwritingPunchlineCitizenMinister
Book:Wealth of Words
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“From what the Oxford scholar [TE Lawrence] had seen, military culture was a world of hidebound careerists looking for a knighthood or their next medal, and of underlings loath to question the powerful, with countless thousands dying as a result.”

BureaucracySelf ServingOutdatedSycophantCareerismUnimaginativeHideboundMuscleboundToadying
Book:Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
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“One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred 'experience' on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main 'experience' involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency.”

PoliticsUnited StatesCapitalismExperienceSocialismHealth CareWhite HouseBureaucracyHillary ClintonBill Clinton2008United States Elections 2008Health Care In The United StatesClinton Health Care Plan Of 1993Health Maintenance Organization
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“No military organization can exist without bureaucracy, as distasteful as it may be, and no professional organization should tolerate inefficient administration of bureaucratic requirements. As mentioned above, such problems deplete morale and are a true risk to the operational effectiveness of a command.”

BureaucracyGovernment PolicyDefense PolicyMilitary AdministrationDefence Policy
Book:On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines
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“The Deep State is really just a collection of unaccountable bad actors at the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy, the media, elected office, corporations, and cultural institutions, who abuse the power they have been given and the institutions they were hired to serve in order to protect themselves and manipulate politics in their favor. And they are aided and abetted by staff in the government who are either in on the game or too afraid to speak up. I regularly used to tell people that the fastest way to move up in the government is to just screw up, and the bigger the screwup, the bigger the promotion. Every person implicated in your mistakes has an interest in covering up what they did, so they will promote you. That means the people at the very top are usually the most immoral, unethical people in the entire agency.”

GovernmentCorruptionBureaucracyDeep State
Book:Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy
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“Once government undertakes to determine the whole wage structure and is thereby forced to control employment and production, there will be a far greater destruction of the present powers of the unions than their submission to the rule of equal law would involve. Under such a system the unions will have only the choice between becoming the willing instrument of governmental policy an being incorporated into the machinery of government, on the one hand, and being totally abolished, on the other. The former alternative is more likely to be chosen, since it would enable the existing union bureaucracy to retain their position and some of their personal power. But to the workers it would mean complete subjection to the control by a corporative state. The situation in most countries leaves us no choice but to await some such outcome or to retrace our steps. The present position of the unions cannot last, for they can function only in a market economy which they are doing their best to destroy.”

GovernmentUnionsEmploymentBureaucracyStateMarket
Book:The Constitution of Liberty
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“State first, subject second, statesman last.”

InspirationalWritingCountryPhilosophyWisdomGovernmentMotivationalQuotesPoliticsKnowledgeDemocracySpeechVoteIndiaWittyCorruptionWitAdministrationMovieVotingStoryRhetoricPolitics QuotesBureaucracyPolitical PartiesPoliticiansCreative WritingGovernanceSlogansCiviliansPolitical ScienceNationAmit KalantriAmit Kalantri QuotesPublic SpeakingProverbsElectionsSocial NetworkingBloggingGovernment QuotesCharactersAmit Kalantri WriterAdageNovel WritingStateBook WritingEssayPublicScriptAdvertisementBlogMovie DialogueScript WritingCatchphrasesAlliterationsStatesmanshipTag LinesScriptwritingCatch LinesSpeechwritingPunchlineCitizenPublic SectorSubjectNationalSix Word StoryStatecraftStatesmanPublic Administration6 Word StoriesPolitical Service
Book:Wealth of Words
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“Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.”

CancerBureaucracyBureaucratsBureauBureaucratization
Book:Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
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“By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.”

LawResponsibilityTyrannyRegulationBureaucracyBureaucratsHuman Judgment
Book:The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America
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“A healthy agency does not require relevance to the national agenda so much as the APPEARANCE of relevance to the national agenda," Humphrey explained. "It is perhaps the second-most important tool in ensuring continued funding." "And the most important?" "A friend on the Appropriations committee.”

GovernmentBureaucracyCivil Service
Book:The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits
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“It is one of the defining features of any bureaucracy that those who staff it are selected by formal, impersonal criteria. Most often, some kind of test. That is, bureaucrats are not, say, elected like politicians. But neither should they get the job just because they are someone's cousin. In theory, they are meritocracies. In fact, everyone knows that the system is compromised in a thousand different ways. Many of the staff are, in fact, there just because they are someone's cousin. And everybody knows it.”

PoliticsHypocrisyBureaucracyComplicityMeritocracyFormalityNepotismStaffing
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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“The most effective move would be to send the tanks with infantry west of Bolshaya Belozerka” Commander Smirnov proposed. “Enemy units there are nearly destroyed — we could threaten a real encirclement.” “That won’t be possible,” the chief of staff objected. “A combat order has just arrived from фронт headquarters: the 15th Tank Brigade, the 530th Anti-Tank Artillery Regiment, and the 30th Cavalry Division are are redeployed to support the 12th Army near Pavlograd, where the situation is critical.” Smirnov turned pale, then his eyes filled with blood. “Damn it!” he slammed his fist on the table. “We needed just two more days. Without tanks now, we’re helpless. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Two Context note: In 1941, rigid bureaucracy and centralized command in the Red Army often prevented commanders from exploiting battlefield opportunities. Delays, reassignments, and fear of independent decisions frequently led to disastrous outcomes.”

LeadershipMilitaryDecision MakingWorld War IiBureaucracy1941Red ArmyMilitary FictionSoviet HistoryWar History
Book:Камень. Биографический роман. Книга вторая. Непростые дороги в ад: Выживание в условиях насилия
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“There had always been aspects of the daily management of Birnam Wood that Mira had seen as her beneath her; she had always acted as though the administration and the democratic protocols were unworthy of her attention and her time. It was one of the ways in which the two friends perfectly complemented each other, for as Mira had often pointed out to her, Shelley really rather liked bureaucracy; she found genuine fulfilment in ticking items off a list, and organising, and making blueprints for the future, and establishing processes of feedback and methods of appeal. Mira had no patience for any of that. She loved to speculate, loved to feel the scope and flex of her own imaginative audacity, loved to test and contradict herself, to keep enlarging, constantly, her own sense of what it was possible to hypothesise and conjure up and entertain, and although this roving speculative energy was something Shelley honestly admired and envied about her, she could also see that it amounted, at times, to a kind of capriciousness, even a callousness, when it came to those aspects of mundane existence that could not be posited or wished away. There was a kind of safety in abstraction, Shelley felt, in visions that remained visions, in ideas that remained ideas….”

IdeasProcessManagementAdministrationBureaucracySpeculationBig IdeasOrganizingProtocolsHypothesizing
Book:Birnam Wood
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“Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.”

StupidityBureaucracyStructural Violence
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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“Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.”

BureaucracyLawsPrison SystemGovernement
Book:Nietzsche, la Genealogía, la Historia
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“One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized.”

SlaveryBureaucracySocial RelationsFreedomsImpersonal Markets
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“The destruction of representative government and private capitalism of the old school was complete when Hitler came to power. He had contributed mightily to the final result by his ceaseless labors to create chaos. But when he stepped into the chancellery all the ingredients of national socialist dictatorship were there ready to his hand… The aim in which Bismarck had failed was accomplished almost at a stroke in the Weimar Constitution – the subordination of the individual states to the federal state. The old imperial state had to depend on the constituent states to provide it with a part of its funds. Now this was altered, and the central government of the republic became the great imposer and collector of taxes, paying to the states each a share. Slowly the central government absorbed the powers of the states. The problems of business groups and social groups were all brought to Berlin. The republican Reichstag, unlike its imperial predecessor, was now charged with the vast duty of managing almost every energy of the social and economic life of the republic. German states were always filled with bureaus, so that long before World War I travelers referred to the ‘bureaucratic tyrannies’ of the empire. But now the bureaus became great centralized organisms of the federal government dealing with the multitude of problems which the Reichstag as completely incapable of handling. Quickly, the actual function of governing leaked out of the parliament into the hands of the bureaucrats. The German republic became a paradise of bureaucracy on a scale which the old imperial government never knew. The state, with its powers enhanced by the acquisition of immense economic powers and those powers brought to the center of government and lodged in the executive, was slowly becoming, notwithstanding its republican appearance, a totalitarian state that was almost unlimited in its powers.”

TaxesFascismDictatorshipNaziBureaucracyHitlerCentralizationExecutiveWeimar RepublicNational Socialist
Book:As We Go Marching: A Biting Indictment of the Coming of Domestic Fascism in America
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