James Veitch Quotes

Getting one bill passed is close to impossible. Ask any kid who has spent a summer in Washington, or better yet a semester, and can't understand how people tolerate its menu of constant frustration. Imagine mastering it.

There is nothing quite so depressing as waking up to face a day when you know that you are going to have to deal with a government office or bureaucrat.

I think I'm drawn to more villain-type characters, because it's so cool to get to say all the things you want to say. In Hollywood, you get to this position where you have to bite your tongue so much. You take all your experiences of not being able to say what you really want to say, and channel that through your character.

I'm in this business to make films, not get deluded by the system. The system is set up to give you a headache.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

Every once in a while I think, 'What am I doing out here running, busting myself up? Life could be so much easier. The other guys are out having fun, doing other things, why not me?'

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.

When I visit local communities, people often complain that they need the approval of several dozen government departments to get something done or to start a business, and people are quite frustrated about this.

My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.

Government regulation is not a dangerous usurpation of your Constitutional rights. It's just a pain in the ass.

Instead of fighting terrorism, we were fighting bureaucratic inertia, an implacable enemy.

The damned everlasting clatter for offices makes me feel like resigning.

[Describing the White House:] ... temple of inconvenience.

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

Sometimes I think people live in a parallel universe when they say all we need are a few more regulations.

I can see how paperwork and foolishness can destroy something.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

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.

I knew at that young age that going to the Bureau of Indian Affairs was useless, absolutely useless. I grew up having no faith in the bureaucracy of government.

If I had learned how to get along in the quotidian world while keeping up the search for the hidden realm, I might have gotten more out of life. But I believed I was doing hugely important work. I was elitist about it.

One listens to one's lawyer prattle on as long as one can stand it and then signs where indicated.

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.

Things there are no solution to: Inflation, bureaucracy & dandruff.

Sometimes I feel frustration at the bureaucracy for not moving fast enough to deliver in the way that I would prefer. But that is probably because I have worked for many years in the civil society, which tends to move much faster than government.