These bureaucracy quotes will inspire you. Bureaucracy is a system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives or a state or organization governed or managed as a bureaucracy.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging bureaucracy quotes, bureaucracy sayings, and bureaucracy proverbs.
Famous Bureaucracy Quotes
- “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.” ~ Mary McCarthy
- “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “Entrenched bureaucracies are always opposed to fundamental changes.” ~ Christopher Dodd
- “Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.” ~ Alan Keyes
- “An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.” ~ Eugene McCarthy
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“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.” ~ Dale Dauten
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“Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.” ~ Brooks Atkinson
- “The bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.” ~ Karl Marx
- “A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
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“If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.” ~ Hyman Rickover
- “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke
- “Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.” ~ Leon Trotsky
- “The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks, and cabinets – which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.” ~ Alain de Botton
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“The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.” ~ Brooks Atkinson
- “Other countries, such as Israel, successfully employ behavior detection techniques at their airports, but the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems.” ~ John Mica , Bureaucracy quotes inefficiency
- “We will have bigger bureaucracies, bigger labor unions, and bigger state-run corporations. It will be harder to be an entrepreneur because of punitive taxes and regulations. The rewards of success will be expropriated for the sake of attaining greater income equality.” ~ Arthur C. Brooks
- “If we did not have such a thing as an airplane today, we would probably create an agency the size of NASA to build one.” ~ Ross Perot
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“The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it’s a permanent feature of life and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” ~ Mark Steyn
- “When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities Committee, the signals that sent through Ottawa were major, because that’s what the bureaucracy understands.” ~ Brian Mulroney
- “There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.” ~ Gore Vidal
- “Bureaucrats are the only people in the world who can say absolutely nothing and mean it.” ~ Hugh Sidey
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“Today we know that centralization and big bureaucracies have not, as promised, been the answer for promoting better opportunities for society.” ~ Carlos Salinas de Gortari
- “Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.” ~ Joseph A. Schumpeter
- “Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.” ~ Milton Friedman
- “The answer for healthcare is market incentives, not healthcare by a Godzilla-sized government bureaucracy.” ~ Mitt Romney
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“We will cut programs, we will try to rein in the size of the bureaucracy. We will bring federal pay scales that have become so exaggerated into line with market rates.” ~ Eric Cantor
- “It’s all papers and forms, the entire Civil Service is like a fortress made of papers, forms, and red tape.” ~ Alexander Ostrovsky
- “Temporary teams of trusted people are generally sent to all Departments and to major agencies of government to assist in planning and to acquaint the incoming administration with the civil servants and bureaucracy that will remain in place in the new Administration.” ~ Richard V. Allen
- “Health care comprises nearly 20 percent of our national economy, but outdated bureaucracy and red tape have stifled competition and raised costs. As a result, today more than 45 million are without any health coverage.” ~ John Shadegg
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“I’m against big bureaucracy in Washington making health care decisions. I just have an aversion to bureaucrats. But it’s not just government bureaucrats. I don’t like HMO bureaucrats and insurance company bureaucrats either.” ~ Gary Bauer
- “Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy.” ~ Chris Chocola
- “So many signatures for such a small heart.” ~ Mother Teresa
- “The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.” ~ Tim Berners-Lee
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“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.” ~ Walter Bagehot
- “Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?” ~ Frank Herbert
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“The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.” ~ John Stuart Mill
- “Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.” ~ Honore de Balzac
- “I don’t want a lot of bureaucracy… I want to run state government the same way we run a campaign – efficient, effective and victorious.” ~ Charlie Crist
- “A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.” ~ John Hickenlooper
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“We need to remind our core supporters that we have not forgotten their concern with the way our democracy is being replaced by European bureaucracy in so many areas.” ~ John Redwood
- “Such schemes take money from people who can least afford to spend it to support an unneeded bureaucracy that eats money people thought they were providing for education.” ~ Jesse Helms
- “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle’s law of Bureaucracy]” ~ Jerry Pournelle
- “Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need.” ~ Bill Maher
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“I’ve never been married and I’ve no more desire to be married now than I ever have. I hate bureaucracy and I am not religious.” ~ Francesca Annis
- “The bureaucracy is not great. I don’t think Rick Santorum who is not one for being a big proponent of large bureaucracies would be as enthusiastic a supporter of it.” ~ Harold Ford, Jr.
- “Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.” ~ Christopher Bond
- “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
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“The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavor, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration.” ~ Vladimir Putin
- “Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.” ~ Donald Rumsfeld
- “It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich , Bureaucracy quotes civilization
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“Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.” ~ Joseph A. Schumpeter
- “However many people complain about the “red tape,” it would be sheer illusion to think … continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices…. The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dilettantism.” ~ Max Weber
- “the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy, there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” ~ Hannah Arendt
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“Up or out” greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job.” ~ James Fallows
- “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.” ~ Chaim Potok
- “Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity.” ~ Richard M. Nixon
Bureaucracy is a large group of people who are involved in running a government but who are not elected state/city bureaucracies.
