Evan Esar Quotes

I can see how paperwork and foolishness can destroy something.

Sears had layers and layers of people it didn't need. It was very bureaucratic. It was slow to think. And there was an established way of thinking. If you poked your head up with a new thought, the system kind of turned against you. It was everything in the way of a dysfunctional big bureaucracy that you would expect.

Lacking a profit motive, workers in the government by and large have a different work ethic from those in private industry. When they could make one call, federal workers take a meeting. When they could find an answer on the Internet, they form a study committee. Instead of appointing one supervisor, they appoint five.

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

When companies get big, they slow down. They're not as exciting. If you want to get something done, it takes a lot of time and a lot of meetings.

I confess to a prejudice against officialism and a dread of bureaucracy.

Superfluous bureaucracies and the system of file-keeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced by them … are totally alien to Islam

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

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.

It must be a source of great chagrin to those in charge to think of so many people being able to stick a stamp on a letter and drop it in a mail box without any trouble or suffering at all. They are probably working on a system this very minute, trying to devise some way in which the public can be made to fill out a blank, stand in line, consult some underling who will refer him to a superior, and then be made to black up with burned cork before they can mail a letter.

We bury the men who do the nation's creative work under layers of administrators and mountains of memoranda. We shrivel creativity by endless frustrations.

A lot of what is called 'public service' consists of making hoops for other people to jump through. It is a great career for those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.

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.

I ... can sniff out a bureaucracy when I see it coming [in new legislation.]

... an impossible organization to administer ... just an amorphous lump.

The Navajo Nation spends most of its time jumping through hoops.

It is a huge bureaucracy. It is so inept. But it does function.

In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it.

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.

Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.