Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

No government body is more notorious for over-legislation than the Department of Trade and Industry.

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

The World Is Too Much Governed

Sometimes I think people live in a parallel universe when they say all we need are a few more regulations.

Often, when I became a consultant to a federal agency, that precipitated its demise.

High-level corruption, inefficiency, non-governance, and policy paralysis have crippled the nation's economy.

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.

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

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

It's like our country is being run by a bunch of bad alcoholic dads right now.

Most people would agree that the E.U. is too bureaucratic, not transparent or democratic enough and that it often interferes too much in matters that are best left to national governments.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

We'll always have bureaucracies, but bureaucracies led by bureaucrats might be too much of a bad thing.

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.

We must fight against negativeness - especially bureaucracy, corruption and wastefulness.

We're on our way to Greece, in the hands of a confused, foolish government. It's got to stop. It's got to stop.

We have government by the clueless, over a place they’ve never been, using means they don’t possess.

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.

I feel smothered as I suffer at being governed by uneducated and ignorant leaders.

Government does not have basic business sense.

We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania [Often translated as bureaucracy.]

I look over a problem and decide what to do. No sooner have I sent out an instruction than it’s overridden by the White House or leaked to the press, or a call comes in from some Congressional staffer irately challenging what we are doing. In business, when we decided to do something, we did it. In government, nothing ever gets settled.