Quotes about Bureaucracy

I don't like being watched. I hate punch cards and flex time.  I'm allergic to cross-referenced lists.  I detest passport control and birth certificates.  Obligatory school attendance, mandatory disclosure of information, legally required financial support, legal liability, oaths of confidentiality - the whole rotten monstrosity of government controls and demands that fall on your head when you come to Denmark.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Trust is essential for our social wellbeing. Without trusting the good will of others we retreat into bureaucracy, rules and demands for more law and order. Trust is based on positive experiences with other people an it grows with use. We need to trust that others are going be basically reasonable beings.

...the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incomptence and lack of discipline--a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.

...culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy.

It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture and community cohesion; a certain hostility toward luxury; a belief that the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional.

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.

It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Bureaucracy is the death of any achievement.

Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellspring of initiative and creativity.

1. Never give a bureaucrat a chance to say no.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up.

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

We have forgotten in America that a democracy is the most difficult kind of government to maintain. It is the hardest kind of government under which to live. It is hardest to maintain because of the widespread political corruption to which it so easily lends itself. Our drift today toward complete totalitarian bureaucracy is one that threatens immediately the very freedoms for which our own boys are dying.

Eugene McCarthy despaired, "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency."

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.