Bureaucratic Culture Quotes

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

The government and the Party are always blaming the comrades doing local work but never themselves, always seeing their own achievements but never their own shortcomings, and always welcoming flattery but never criticism....

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

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

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

For most career bureaucrats, the most important reference points are other career officials; they are bureaucratic loyalists rather than Presidential loyalists.

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

A cardinal rule of bureaucracy is that it is better to extend an error than to admit a mistake.

I'd say she's get us both fired, but the I.S. doesn't let anyone go. Alive.

I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.

The sad fact is that it would be fair to say that United is a generic, bureaucratic, tired company. A sort of DMV in the sky. No real culture. No real strategy. No real expectations for employees or customers. All of which is a shame.

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

Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator

Nobody in the Washington regulatory bureaucracy gets fired for saying no.

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

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

They work for bureaucracies and they become bureaucratized themselves.

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.

Governance in India comes in the iron-clad armour of bureaucracy. Anyone in uniform considers it his or her right that we regard them as some sort of deity.

There's tremendous pressure, if you're in that [goverment] system, to be involved and be interested and to care about it. There's no room to say, "This is stupid."

In business, you learn from mistakes. In government, they never do.

The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.

Somehow in the public sector, if you start in the mailroom and spend your life getting promoted, it's unseemly.

There is something about the Foreign Service that takes the guts out of people.

We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.