Michael De Bakey Quotes

Getting the U. S. Government to do anything is like herding ducks with a broom.

Administrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.

Government on its own is always inefficient.

Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.

The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

The persistence of public officials varies inversely with the importance of the matter on which they are persisting

The bureaucracy is what we all suffer from..

If everyone in government would refuse to sign everything they couldn't read, everything would grind to a screeching halt.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

Our government is the most successful contrivance the world has ever known for preventing things from being done.

No centralized bureaucracy, or so-called "paternal government," yet invented on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything else

The War Office is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and one in which the Minister's intentions can be entirely negated by all his sub-departments, and those of each of the sub-departments by every other.

The Civil Service rewards those who do no more than sit at their desks and say no.

Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.

The major functions of the government are … operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

I want you to cut through red tape. I want you to cut through bureaucracy. There is no excuse for inaction at this point.

Bureaucracies cling to their office space, their secretaries [assistants], their official cars, and their every allotted dollar and personnel position with a tenacity that drowning men might well envy.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture. The agency has an advanced case of bureaucratic arteriosclerosis.

The more the government plans fail, the more the planners plan.

I have found in my years of working in the government than when I face a choice of explanations of venality or incompetence in explaining some government activities, it is almost always incompetence that explains it. It often appears to be venality because we do not realize how incompetent government and large private organizations can be sometimes.

The government generally is just too top-heavy.