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Bureaucracy Quotes

Browse 552 quotes about Bureaucracy.

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Bureaucracy Quotes

“I must express in the strongest possible terms my profound opposition to the newly instituted practice which imposes severe and intolerable restrictions on the ingress and egress of senior members of the hierarchy and will, in all probability, should the current deplorable innovation be perpetuated, precipitate a progressive constriction of the channels of communication, culminating in a condition of organizational atrophy and administrative paralysis which will render effectively impossible the coherent and co-ordinated discharge of the function of government within Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." ..... "You mean you've lost your key?" I asked.”

BureaucracyVerboseSesquipedalian
Author:Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay
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“This was my time at the MUN; not just a symbol of international cooperation, but a dark and mysterious nexus of conspiracy and intrigue. Indeed, a place where the forces of chaos and order collide in an endless struggle for dominance. But let's not kid ourselves, behind the facade of diplomatic protocols and bureaucratic banalities lurks a dark underbelly. A shadow world of secret meetings and covert operations, where the true rulers of the world pull the strings of fate like puppeteers in a grand cosmic theater. Here, in the labyrinthine corridors and dimly lit backrooms, the fate of nations is not decided by the will of the people, but by the whims of those who dwell in the shadows.”

BureaucracyUnited NationsDiplomacyInternational RelationsUnPolticsInternational PoliticsChaos And OrderMunConspiracy And Intrigue
Author:Ryan Gelpke
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“There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees" problem.”

UniversityCommitteesBureaucracy
Book:The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
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“Many at the State Department think its their job, not the Army's, to develop cultural and regional expertise and relationships. In such quarters, the RAF concept looks less like an innovative approach to global risk management than yet another military effort to replace diplomats with soldiers.”

MilitaryBureaucracyJob SecurityEmpire Building
Book:How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
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“Christian preachers [...] were intransigent. They, they said, were answerable to a higher power than the mere law of the land. Their eye was upon heaven. As they reminded their flocks, it was not the law of some imperial bureaucrat that mattered. It was the law of God. Anything that saved a soul – even if it did so at the expense of law, order or even the body that that soul inhabited – was an acceptable act. To attack the houses, bodies and temples of those afflicted by the ‘pagan error’ was not to harm these sinners but to help them. This was not brutality. This was kindness, education, reformation.”

LawEducationChristianityBureaucracyReformationMonotheismIntransigence
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Except in Punjab and the NWFP, the central government’s Kashmir policy had little support in Sindh or Balochistan and even less in East Bengal. Instead of serving the people, civil servants and their allies in the army hoisted the political leaders with their Kashmir petard to become the veritable masters of the manor through autocratic and unconstitutional means.”

BureaucracyPakistan Military
Book:The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
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“Confidential matters are not dealt with over the telephone, you'd better come here in person. I cannot leave the house, Do you mean you're ill, Yes, I'm ill, the blind man said after a pause. In that case you ought to call a doctor, a real doctor, quipped the functionary, and, delighted with his own wit, he rang off. The man's insolence was like a slap in the face. Only after some minutes had passed, had he regained enough composure to tell his wife how rudely he had been treated. Then, as if he had discovered something that he should have known a long time ago, he murmured sadly, This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice.”

IndifferenceBureaucracyBlindnessMalice
Book:Blindness
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“As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed. At first there were laws. Then there were decrees implementing laws. Then a law was made saying, ‘There shall be no laws.’ Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes. Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers. Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral. And finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do.”

YearsFirstsMadeStillsWholeGovernmentLawOrderDecisionWrittenChangedQuietStructureNewspapersDecision MakingRegimesNaziBureaucracyDecreeAnnouncementsImplementing
Author:Raul Hilberg
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“Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.”

SelfGovernmentPoliticsProductsCompetitionForgottenExtremesEnterpriseMinoritiesElitesFrustratedBureaucracyTaxationFree EnterpriseOppressive Governments
Book:The Last Best Hope: The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagan
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“Charters give public school teachers the flexibility to design programs to the individual student needs. They no longer have to go to a distant bureaucracy to ask for permission. By being allowed to make their own decisions the teachers are able to create strong partnerships with parents.”

NeedsGivingAbleSchoolAsksIndividualStrongParentDecisionTeacherDesignStudentsProgramPartnershipPermissionBureaucracyFlexibilityPublic SchoolCharterSchool Teachers
Author:Gary Larson
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“Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today. So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency, give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.”

PeopleNeedsGivingTodayGreaterPleaseAreasGive MeAskingCongressCaringTrialsIdiotSensitiveAgencyBureaucracyNew Orleans
Author:Aaron Broussard
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“The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.”

HumansAirPaperBreatheAtmosphereBureaucracyInkEndeavourSupremacyHopes And Fears
Book:The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad - All 20 Works in One Premium Edition: Including Unforgettable Titles like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and Many More (With Author’s Letters, Memoirs and Critical Essays)
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“It's my greatest success. Women did not vote in Italy until 1946. A good friend and I put together a group of women to protest this. I was very young, just a girl. We went to the Viminale [home of the Ministry of the Interior] and spoke to the chair of the ministry board. Thanks to our initiative, we got the bureaucracy rolling on giving women the right to vote. I have to thank my father for this. He was in Geneva at the League of Nations, and women voted there. He thought it was absurd that women didn't vote in his country yet.”

GivingCountryHomeTogetherYoungGirlFatherNationsGroupsVoteAbsurdThanksLeagueBoardsChairsProtestSpokesInitiativeMinistryRollingGood FriendBureaucracyInteriorsRight To VoteGenevaGreatest SuccessJust A GirlLeague Of Nations
Author:Giovanna Cau
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“Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”

StatesGovernmentIndividualExerciseAuthorityIllusionVotePressureMajorityOrganizedMinoritiesVotersRegulationEvidentBureaucracyFragmentsCompulsionComprehensiveSusceptible
Author:Walter Lippmann
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“The goal that the Obama team has is to fundamentally replace the historic America of self reliance, independence, the work ethic, the people who go out and achieve because they spend their lifetime doing the right things and they want to replace it with a politician dominated redistributionist bureaucracy which in the essence would mean the end of the America as it has been for the last 400 years.”

PeopleWantYearsMeanHas BeensEndsSelfLastsAmericaGoalTeamAchievePoliticianEthicsEssenceIndependenceLifetimeRight ThingWork EthicBureaucracySelf RelianceHistoricRelianceDoing The Right Thing
Author:Newt Gingrich
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“In our time ... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.”

MenYearsPassionWinningNamesVoiceEnemyCivilizationThousandOfficeSixAncientCloudsTinyOur TimeSpokesPossessedThousand YearsBureaucracyImaginativeBureaucratsAncient TimesFaceless
Author:Chaim Potok
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