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Bureaucrats Quotes

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“Business was booming and people were getting rich. Many bureaucrats enjoyed the new sense of power they had over their fellow citizens, and became known as kleine, or small, Hitlers. Hitler and members of the Nazi Party continued in their insane quest to become the leaders of a unified Europe. Never mind that this unification would be by force and that it would draw the entire world into another major catastrophe. Already Jews and others, who were considered undesirables by the Nazi régime, were fleeing the country.... That is, if they could afford the passage out. Hitler’s expansionary philosophy was apparent, but no one would risk speaking up. Even friends could not be trusted, and so it became a time of great anxiety. Fellow workers turned in colleagues if they thought it could advance their own position. In some cases, even family members could not be trusted! Hitler said “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell, or an extremely wretched life as paradise.”

“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.”

“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.”

“They read a little bit, write a little, and especially agree with themselves on important moves, important information, important awards, important writers that they plan to enthrone forever in history through a variety of memberships and numerous prizes awarded under the influence of top bureaucrats who know everything, not only about literature, but also about secret conspiracies, the Masons that lurk in every corner to crucify someone, steal someone’s soul and sell it to an unknown devil, about whom only the chief bureaucrat possesses secret knowledge that he doesn’t share; about history, ghosts, missing continents; about who said what to whom in confidence.”

“The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.”

“Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly or for a successful 'intent to monopolize'; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for 'unfair competition' or 'restraint of trade'; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for 'collusion' or 'conspiracy.'”

“It pains me to see my old company, which has meant so much to America, on the ropes. But Chrysler has been in trouble before, and we got through it, and I believe they can do it again... Let's face it, if your car breaks down, you're not going to take it to the White House to get fixed. But, if your company breaks down, you've got to go to the experts on the ground, not the bureaucrats.”

“Firebugs dragging their gasoline bottles are approaching the Academy of Arts, with a grin. And so, instead of embracing them, let us demand the freedom of the elbow to knock the bottles out of their filthy hands. Even the most blockheaded bureaucrat, provided he loves peace, is a greater lover of the arts than any so-called art-lover who loves the arts of war.”

“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.”

“At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water-right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.”

“The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture.”