Bureaucratic Process Quotes

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

In the Congress, for every small thing, you have to consult the general secretaries.

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.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

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.

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

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

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

Many veterans in Mississippi struggle with the bureaucratic process of the Veterans Administration.

It must be a source of great chagrin to those in charge to think of so many people being able to stick a stamp on a letter and drop it in a mail box without any trouble or suffering at all. They are probably working on a system this very minute, trying to devise some way in which the public can be made to fill out a blank, stand in line, consult some underling who will refer him to a superior, and then be made to black up with burned cork before they can mail a letter.

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

The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.

In high school, I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles, and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done, and nobody was really interested in getting anything done.

One of the enduring truths of the nation's capital is that bureaucrats survive.

Communicating to the President through the State Department would be like making love through the mattress.

Serving in the executive branch is very different than sounding off from an academic perch.

People want things now. People in the rock world seem to not want to give it to them - they want to keep doing things the old way - and one thing that has always bummed me out is when we get a single three months out, and then you have to keep getting fed with bread crumbs.

Interdepartmental memoranda, advisory opinions, recommendations of subordinates, informal working papers, material in personnel files, and the like, cannot be subject to disclosure if there is to be any orderly system of government.

They sit there in committees day after day, And they each put in a color and it comes out gray. And we all have heard the saying, which is true as well as witty, That a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.

You can lead a bureaucrat to water, but you can't make him think.

However many people complain about the "red tape," it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices.... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism.

Congress, after years of stalling, finally got around to clearing the way for informal discussions that might lead to possible formal talks that could potentially produce some kind of tenative agreements.

It's really hard to get a coffee with someone. I have to call my agent, my agent calls their agent, their agent calls their manager, the manager calls back, the actor sends someone to the manager... then you get, 'Yeah, yeah, I'd love to have dinner at six,' and all I wanted was coffee! It can take, like, six days to get coffee.

There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.

One of the things that happens that's challenging within the democratic process is that people say, 'Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.' And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn't work that well.