Walter Bagehot Quotes

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

Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures.

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

Government on its own is always inefficient.

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.

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.

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.

Governments take too long to get things done and there are far too many varied interests at stake. If you were starting a business today and needed a partner, you would never choose a large bureaucratic institution like the government.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.

I've always been fond of the saying that when it comes to oversight and reform, the federal government does two things well: nothing and overreact.

Administrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being

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.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

One thing about bureaucrats is that they never swallow their young. Leave them alone and you'll find them increasing every year.

There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.

It's that government bureaucracies crush innovation. We are falling further and further behind in our government.

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.

Talk about threats to national security -- how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it cant get out of its own way?

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.

We've got a very poor record on unnecessary red tape; extra cost to business; people being asked to do things they don't need to; over the top regulation, misinterpreted regulation, poor guidelines.

I've seen the government up close and personal, and for the most part, it's inefficient and hidebound, and it stifles creativity in any industry it clutches within its well-meaning but slimy tentacles.

News flash: The federal government is not the most efficient institution in the world. Taxpayers know that.

Whether you're a veteran or a millennial, it's hard to argue that big government has solved your problems efficiently, if at all.