Robert Benchley Quotes

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

Our government is the most successful contrivance the world has ever known for preventing things from being done.

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

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.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

The problem is that agencies sometimes lose sight of common sense as they create regulations.

Everybody who goes into government gets somewhat chewed up in the process. Being a senior appointee is like being at a startup, only more so: You run into opposition from the entrenched oligopoly of contractors whose business model is to extract as much money from government as possible for doing as little as possible.

Delay has the odor of the Beltway.

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

I ... can sniff out a bureaucracy when I see it coming [in new legislation.]

Superfluous bureaucracies and the system of file-keeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced by them … are totally alien to Islam

I want you to learn nothing from government. This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this.

CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture. The agency has an advanced case of bureaucratic arteriosclerosis.

There is no question that the federal government sometimes overdoes it in issuing rules and regulations.

I never saw a bureaucracy produce a single barrel of oil.

The big corporations have a team of lawyers and accountants to help them. It's the small businesses, the mom and pop shops, that get lost in the layers of red tape.

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

What drives me crazy is when you have a supervisor in government, and they report into 12 other supervisors. That's unacceptable.

Federal rules and regulations too often become seemingly insurmountable obstacles to simple changes that can have a positive impact.

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.

When I travel around the country, I see great companies with new ideas and a can-do attitude. But too often they are in hand-to-hand and pen-to-paper combat with officialdom.

The truth is that the E.U. constrains us in all manner of ways and throws reams of red tape around British businesses.

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

Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.