Theodore C. Sorensen Quotes

Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

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

The last thing we need to do now is reorganize and create a new department.

When we consider that this government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states; that the states themselves have principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices or officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily, and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

The administrative process is, in essence, our generation’s answer to the inadequacy of the judicial and legislative processes. It represents our efforts to find an answer to those inadequacies by some other method than merely increasing executive power.

The question of our time is rapidly becoming can government get things done?

We have to be bold, tough, and fundamentally change government because Springfield is broken.

To me, a politician's job is to listen to constituents' problems and try to sort them out.

My effectiveness is best placed in solving problems through federal solutions.

County government can be simplified greatly by reorganizing and consolidating some of the offices, making others appointive, and reducing salaries in keeping with the salaries paid by private business for the performance of similar duties.

The government is just too big, and we have to make it smaller; people are getting lost.

I have the experience and ability to step in on day one in Washington and start working on the challenging problems facing our country.

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

The British civil service ... is a beautifully designed and effective braking mechanism.

Most of the energy devoted to political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

It is easier to waste time on bureaucratic reorganization than it is to accomplish anything concrete.

Being Attorney General is a lot better than being a judge. You can get something done. If you have an idea, you’ve got thousands of people you can put to work on the idea.

If you are a U. S. senator, you can give an ideological response to a serious problem and probably never be held accountable for it. Whereas the [state] governors are dealing with the real world—they have to run things, to make them work.

I'm surprised that a government organization could do it that quickly.

Already I realize the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service. My Minister’s room is like a padded cell, and in certain ways I am like a person who is suddenly certified a lunatic and put safely into this great vast room, cut off from real life ... Of course, they don’t behave quite like nurses because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential – “Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister! Yes minister.”

Organization cannot make a genius out of a dunce.

The principal concern of Mexico’s political elite today is how to build governing majorities and achieve consensus.

we must not be bureaucratic in our methods of mobilizing the masses. Bureaucratic leadership cannot be tolerated in economic construction any more than in any other branch of our revolutionary work. The ugly evil of bureaucracy, which no comrade likes, must be thrown into the cesspit.

Only when the modern bureaucracy was highly developed could the complete abolition of the parish priests as a political institution be contemplated.