Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of every paper before he destroys it.

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

A big company is like trying to steer a luxury liner.

Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody.

I will have an administrative system where there is no way to extricate red tape.

We may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.

Big is bad - the corollary of Schumacher's small is beautiful. The centralized state, particularly the mass-society state of the 20th century, is inherently a failure: it is authoritarian and anti-liberty, imposing checks and laws on all individual actions; it is hierarchical and arbitrary, with power at the top and subservience for the great majority below; it is bureaucratic in order to function at all, but it functions poorly nonetheless because bureaucracies are always inefficient and clumsy and self-perpetuating; it is undemocratic, because it is too big to allow direct face-to-face decision making and substitutes various forms of representation, all of which take power from the individual.

If some imaginative practical joker had been appointed by the malevolent gods to devise, for our sins, a system of municipal government, he would have invented something like what we have, though better.

The bureaucracy is what we all suffer from..

It is not possible to assume that a world carried on by division of labor and authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.

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

We don't have a health care system. We have a health care maze.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

There’s enough fat in the federal government that if you rendered it, you could wash the world.

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

When I was working in the Pentagon, I had to own the recommendations I made up the chain of command.

Everybody has a corporate structure.

In the first place, bureaucracies never become efficient; they're never going to get rid of administrative costs; they're never going to reduce them. That's not the purpose of bureaucracies. It's to increase those things.

All the public systems – administration, justice, education and political are designed to keep people with knowledge out. Such a system promotes mediocrity.

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.

First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection.

Too many cooks spoil the broth

I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill ... What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?'