Newt Gingrich Quotes

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

The Pentagon isn't a place that champions individuality and innovation.

The bureaucracies that are in place now, they're not going to change, they're not going to stop.

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

Lacking a profit motive, workers in the government by and large have a different work ethic from those in private industry. When they could make one call, federal workers take a meeting. When they could find an answer on the Internet, they form a study committee. Instead of appointing one supervisor, they appoint five.

Civil servants take forever to do anything.

And I think it's true of any big organization... Bureaucracies and organizations make it hard to do the right thing sometimes.

Should bureaucratic ways prevail and paper reign supreme? Should red tape and the Status Quo become our nation’s dream?

People complain about bureaucracy. You haven't seen bureaucracy until you've seen bureaucracy in China.

Government officials tend to become an obstacle when you try to do something new.

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.

The major functions of the government are … operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

Governments today are organizations of elderly men who know no other to work and govern than the ways of their youth.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

[Independent Federal] agencies, like other bureaucracies don’t like being transformed.. They have cultures and they want to preserve those cultures.

During my seven years and eight months as chief Cabinet secretary, I noticed that when policies are slow to move forward, it's usually because of bureaucrats' sectionalism and a penchant for sticking with precedents.

At a big company, often size turns into constipation; it fogs the lens about what's really happening. Sometimes with size and success comes the notion that since we've done things to be successful, we have the formula and can institutionalize it. That can be death.

The Soviet system is how everything here works. It's very difficult to break the system. The system is big and inflexible, uneffective, and also corrupt. And that is our main goal: to change the system, to break the system, to make it modern.

Because we've always done it that way.' During my 12-year tenure as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, I heard those words all too often. The agency, in my experience, has an entrenched management culture resistant to change.

Efforts to reform are often met with resistance because the system always tries to fall back to the status quo and what is comfortable.

Outside of traffic, there is nothing that has held this country back as much as committees.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

The Civil Service is a bit like a rusty weathercock. It moves with opinion then it stays where it is until another wind moves it in a different direction