Tom Lantos Quotes

We can get rid of red tape.

The problem in D.C. is that everything is on paper, and it's theoretical.

Simplifying the tax code and reducing administrative burdens will save small businesses money and time and let owners and employees focus less on paperwork and more on how to operate in this tough economy.

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

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

That is why I strongly believe we should working in Congress to make America a better place to run a business by reducing the costly burdens of bureaucracy and red tape.

When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.

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

Delay has the odor of the Beltway.

Compared to publicity…internal checks upon bureaucratic misbehavior…have but negligible value.

You can't, in a government agency, regulate everything that moves ... you can't regulate everything ... you must strike a balance.

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

If the Board of Trade or Local Government Board managed their business after the fashion of the Foreign Office and Colonial Office, you and I should deserve to be hung.

FBI documents are a lethal garbage can. Everything that anybody has ever said about someone is put in the file…. You have to read everything and decide what is important.

No altered system will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

In any operation as large as that of the federal government there are always going to be anomalies, mistakes and peccadilloes. The trick is to incite so much public (or at least media) outrage about them that the government has eventually to cut its losses rather than risk continued political damage.

How much we all suffer from lack of oversight from the government.

All bureaucracies have to be weeded and watched.

When we're worried about a bureaucracy and keeping the bureaucracy going, you're always going to make mistakes.

The Home Office is a vast department where business as usual means that something is going wrong and, given the nature of the business, the disasters rarely lack a high profile.

Documenting and recording paperwork, managing services like passport renewals, and processing patent applications are practices that could all be dramatically improved with robotic automation.

I will make utmost efforts to conduct regulatory reform by tearing down bureaucratic sectionalism, vested interests and notorious habit of following precedents.

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

We needed someone to recognize the importance of check and balances, accountability, transparency. There was a real systemic problem at South Carolina State, a problem that has gone on for 25 or 30 years