Frederick Forsyth Quotes

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.

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

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.

Amateur bureaucrats are often even worse than professional bureaucrats.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

Almost everything the government runs becomes mediocre in time ... bureaucracy leads to mediocrity.

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.

There's a can't-do attitude in this town [Washington DC] that I haven't seen anywhere else ... It's like running through a field of marshmallows in terms of getting anything done.

Britain has invented a new missile. It's called the Civil Servant. It doesn't work and it can't be fired.

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

We say that word [bureaucracy] with such contempt. But it's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that's working against us.

You wonder sometimes how our government puts on its pants in the morning.

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

We're looking for stuff everyone agrees is a complete waste of time. Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate. It's been so long since somebody asked them to look backwards.

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.

It takes our government an awful lot of time to do most things competently, and that's part of the problem here.

We do not need committees but we need commitment. The nation is already reeling under the burden of several committees formed in the last decade.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

Recognition of the inevitability of comprehensive bureaucratization does not solve the problems that arise out of it.

Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.

Trying to make things work in government is sometimes like trying to sew a button on a custard pie.

We have a system in the hands of bureaucracy. Everything is difficult. Everything is complicated. And my idea is simply give simplicity to Italy.

This congestion in the post offices is due to what are technically known as "regulations" but what are really a series of acrostics and anagrams devised by some officials who got around a table one night and tried to be funny.

Bureaucracy is adept at protecting its nest.

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.