Bureaucracy Quotes

“As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and build walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don't need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.”
― Hannah Arendt, On Violence

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.”
― Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

“I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.”
― Kenny Guinn

“There is no crueler hells then committee work....”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.”
― Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

“It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.”
― Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America

“For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.”
― Mohsin Hamid

“They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves. ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Dead Man's Brother

“Serikali inayodhulumu wananchi wake ni hatari kuliko simba.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Wananchi wanapokosa huduma za muhimu za kijamii (kama vile afya, elimu, chakula, malazi, na ulinzi) ilhali wanalipa kodi, na wameajiri serikali kuwaendeshea nchi kwa kiapo cha uaminifu wa vitabu vitakatifu, watakosa imani na serikali yao! Vilevile wataathirika kiuchumi, kijamii na kisiasa, na vita itaweza kutokea kati ya wananchi na serikali, au wananchi kwa wananchi wataweza hata kujidhuru wenyewe – nikimaanisha vita ya wenyewe kwa wenyewe. Serikali ikifuata maadili ya kazi, na kuacha udikteta na urasimu wa aina yoyote ile, au ikifanya kazi kulingana na misingi ya katiba ya nchi; wananchi watapata huduma za kijamii kama wanavyostahili, na ndoto ya haki na ustawi wa jamii itaweza kutimia. Hata hivyo, serikali inaweza kuwadhulumu wananchi wake kwa sababu ya usalama wao.”
― Enock Maregesi

“for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

“Kati ya nchi yako na serikali yako ni kitu gani unakipenda zaidi? Ipende zaidi nchi yako, kuliko serikali yako!”
― Enock Maregesi

“Ukiipenda sana nchi yako ni rahisi sana kuichukia serikali yake!”
― Enock Maregesi

“All such questions as, for instance,of the cause of failure of crops, of the adherence of certain tribes to their ancient belief, etc.--questions which, but for the convenient intervention of the official machine are not, and cannot be solved for ages--received full, unhesitating solution.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.”
― David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

“These meetings, they're like thieves—they follow you around, wait until you're not looking, and pounce.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“For all the scientific evidence we were amassing, many people, both in government and in the citizenry our elected officials are supposedly beholden to, were still refusing to accept that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

I wasn't the only voice screaming in the wilderness anymore - but still, not everyone heard the call. In those first few years, it was a long uphill battle to get people to recognize what was happening.”
― James Patterson, Zoo

“I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef.”
― Janusz Korwin-Mikke

“Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.”
― David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.

“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.”
― Jim Geraghty, The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits

“Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.”
― Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest

“Let’s form a committee tasked with exploring why committees are so ineffective. Then we’ll stand-back and watch it argue and self-destruct.”
― Ryan Lilly

“The State is not the hope of the world; it is an institution grounded in the threat of violence, whether via capital punishments or petty bureaucratic intrusions.”
― Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

“It is important to remember that bureaucratic politics and rivalry are not just matters of competing for primacy in foreign policy - although they are that too. Rather, most bureaucratic competition comes from the fact that these bureaucracies often have overlapping jurisdictions on policy matters and that each may have legitimate but differing responsibilities. For example, both the CIA and the Defense Department have large intelligence-gathering operations, and at times these overlap and compete; at the same time, the State Department and Defense Department both have important but very different responsibilities in American foreign policy-making, and it is quite understandable that these are not always in exact accord.”
― Howard J. Wiarda, American Foreign Policy: Actors and Processes

“She knew the power of bureaucracy well enough to be aware she had to sit and be admonished until this stranger felt she had expressed sufficient disappointment in a girl she would never have to see again.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre

“Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.”
― David Brooks