Gale W. McGee Quotes

The perfect bureaucrat … is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.

If everyone in government would refuse to sign everything they couldn't read, everything would grind to a screeching halt.

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

Guidelines for bureaucrats: (1) When in charge, ponder. (2) When in trouble, delegate. (3) When in doubt, mumble.

It is less important to find solutions than scapegoats.

The safest refuge when dealing with urgent, ticklish problems is sought in shirking responsibility, in gaining time by the formation of Committees, with the requisite Sub-Committees to tackle the problem. It is the well-known practice of Promise, Pause, Prepare, Postpone and end by letting things alone

Men are only too clever at shifting blame from their own shoulders to those of others.

Too often, it's the Washington way to hide, point fingers, and try to place blame on someone else.

We do not need committees but we need commitment. The nation is already reeling under the burden of several committees formed in the last decade.

I hate it when people blame someone else and don't take responsibility.

The fault of the horse is put on the saddle.

For Christ’s sake, quit being bureaucrats.

The bureaucracy is what we all suffer from..

My responsibility is not to the public. It is to the chairman alone.

Big bureaucracies in business and government—they fail too.

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

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.

Men's common guise is always to lay the burden on some other back.

Don't try to shift your responsibilities on to somebody else.

To err is human. To blame somebody else is politics.

With the best will, no one can be an official and a man.

The Civil Service rewards those who do no more than sit at their desks and say no.

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

Congress does investigations better than they do any thing else. Let them do that…. The people of Louisiana don’t want anyone’s head. They want everyone’s help.

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