Administrative Task Quotes

A lot of what is called 'public service' consists of making hoops for other people to jump through. It is a great career for those who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

I've signed thousands of documents, but never read them.

[Describing the vice presidency:] ... inside work with no heavy lifting.

When I first became a civil servant, I had to fill out a form. The form did not ask whether or not I was a citizen of America but I had to certify that I was a Democrat.

Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.

There's so much paperwork that goes with changing a name.

Zebrowski says that if you killed someone else just hide the body, he's not starting over on the paperwork.

Dad thought something very fishy was going on when, at 22, I was offered a job for £1,000 a year - more than Dad paid his own staff - for inventing cheese recipes and writing leaflets at the Dutch Dairy Bureau in London.

I just filled out my income tax forms. Who says you can't get killed by a blank?

One of my first office jobs was cleaning the windows on brown envelopes.

For three months, when I was 23 years old, I worked as a clerk at Wandsworth Sewer.

In the case of public business in the colony being given to any person by resolution of the decurions: the person to whom such business is given shall produce and shall render an account of the said matter to the decurions without malicious deception as far as possible within 150 days next following his completion of the said business or his ceasing to continue it.

We've very steadily and single-mindedly been building the bureau so that we can do the work that, quote, Congress required us to do and that the American people have every reason to expect, and deserve, that we will do.

I don't have the freaking energy to write a memo. I'm out there saving lives.

When I was in college my girl got me a job at the doctor's office she was working at. I was a file clerk. No disrespect but I don't think a man can do that job. It takes so much meticulous and precise file-keeping.

We know that the Senator does not read every word of legislation. Just as the CEO of General Motors does not attach every nut and bolt to a car.

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.

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

I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.

I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.

As an intern for Vice President Walter Mondale, I arrived the first day ready to write policy memos and change the world... but my assignment was doing an inventory of the furniture.

Poor fellow, he suffers from files.