Thomas Sowell Quotes

They work for bureaucracies and they become bureaucratized themselves.

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

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

The most important rule of bureaucracy is never be wrong and alone.

Being a bureaucrat means never having to say you're sorry.

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.

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.

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

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.

Bureaucracies cling to their office space, their secretaries [assistants], their official cars, and their every allotted dollar and personnel position with a tenacity that drowning men might well envy.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.

In a large bureaucracy, you cannot exercise the transformation of any situation without coopting bureaucracy.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

The British civil service ... is a beautifully designed and effective braking mechanism.

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

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

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

For Christ’s sake, quit being bureaucrats.

There’s a mayor and a council and judges—a hundred men to deal with … and you can’t do business with a lot of officials, who check and cross one another and who come and go …. A business man wants to do business with one man.

Every business action of the individual is supervised and hedged about with red tape and paternal restrictions.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

To safeguard the people's money what we call red tape is tied around all government activity until the really efficient honest public servant has a somewhat difficult time, but we are still laboring under the theory that the majority of the world is dishonest.