Bureaucrats Quotes

“How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel?
We'll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road

“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.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons. If you think about it, this is a really ingenious trick. Because when most of think about police, we do not think of them as enforcing regulation. We think of them as fighting crime, and when we think of "crime," the kind of crime we have in our minds in violent crime. Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it.”
― David Graeber

“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.”
― Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America

“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity, especially when it comes to bureaucrats in a government who has no clueabout money matters”
― Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics

“Business is boss, politics is servant.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Bureaucrats and Politicians are different people, work of Bureaucrats makes us hate Politicians.”
― Amit Kalantri

“The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see only 2 percent of what's in front of them.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, The Soccer War

“You know you're in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think 'A' get together and compromise on 'B.”
― Scott Adams, Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons

“This administrator of trade is the worst sort of bureaucrat. He abides by every rule, delights in making his own whenever it can inconvenience someone, and at the same time believes that he is doing good… I didn’t think I would ever meet a noble who wasn’t corrupt. Now that I have I find that I prefer them when they’re greedy bastards. - Brom”
― Christopher Paolini, Eragon

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. ... in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.”
― John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

“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.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."

“If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy, God will forgive you but the bureaucracy.”
― Hyman George Rickover

“Whether it's personal foibles or a bureaucrat's ego, the stubborn defence of stupidity is unforgivable.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In the forbidden zone of interpretation, the tyranny of language becomes the poisoned-tip of the bureaucratic spear.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The great thing about scrutinizing bureaucracy when you’re a journalist, you see, is that the first people to break the laws of bureaucracy are always the bureaucrats themselves”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“None of my enemies in business come close to the awesomely awful power of government. When this assembly of losers choreographs their bureaucratic ballet, it generates a whirling blackhole that sucks harder than a discount hooker trying to catch up on late payments to a loanshark.”
― Leland McKnight

“For once in his life, Norman has acted rather than gone to a meeting. And this is where it has landed him.”
― Paul Torday, Light Shining In The Forest

“Bureaucrats complicate. It gives them more work to do. It gives them job security. It means promotions as ever more bureaucrats are added to the Ministry of Redundancy.”
― Sieg Pedde

“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.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms

“Sometimes he would rather battle a demon from Hell than grapple with the bureaucracy of man.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

“The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.”
― Brooks Atkinson

“Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof they were busy.”
― Charles Peters, How Washington Really Works

“Modern corporate controlled governments have a really bad dose of toxic bureaucrats.”
― Steven Magee

“An ambassador is a bureaucrat on international tariff.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“Act on people's request before request turn into intimidation.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Bureaucratic apathy is worse than bureaucratic corruption.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Woman Over World: The Novel

“A mousy, middle-aged man with a clean robe and a stony half smile stood among them. He held parchment and an inkwell with two hands and somehow made them look heavy.”
― Nick Oliveri, The Conjurer

“At the end of the day, it was always human beings who were responsible. The tools they employed, the code they wrote, the rules and regulations and chain of command . . . None of these layers actually absolved anyone. They only muddied the waters so the guiltiest parties could pretend they’d done nothing wrong.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck