P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

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

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

Washington DC is a city of motion, not action.

Anyone who's ever filed a tax return or visited the Department of Motor Vehicles understands that government does two things well: spend our money and waste our time.

In high school, I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles, and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done, and nobody was really interested in getting anything done.

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.

Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.

We have seen an outrageous increase in the size, scope, and intrusiveness of the federal government.

The civil service are risk averse.

The minute you're working with the government, you're dealing with bureaucracy, you're dealing with time lags, you're dealing with rigidity, you're dealing with a slow pace.

If you are really interested in making government work, you should have the experience of working in government.

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

Big government is indeed big, and like another big creature, the sauropod dinosaur, government has a primitive nervous system: The fact of an injury to the tail could take nearly a minute to be communicated to the sauropod brain.

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

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

Let us alone. Government is at best a rude, unwieldy and bungling machine; it is an evil, although a necessary evil...

… the admirable purpose of Cabinet Ministers, bent on reforming their different departments, but dexterously 'blocked' by the permanent officials

Congress doesn’t act unless there is an emergency.

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

The question today is not whether the government is too small or too small, but whether or not it works

If you put government in charge of a desert, soon there will be a shortage of sand.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

Government on its own is always inefficient.

Don't make government work like a business... it's inherently inefficient.

In fact, the most important reforms are those needed, without new laws, at various levels of Government, in work practices and procedures.