Bureaucratic Red Tape Quotes

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

I trust the individual over the bureaucracy.

Yes, Ronald Reagan did sleep through cabinet meetings—and deservedly so. They were incredibly tedious. I know; I was there.

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

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.

When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?

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.

The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself.

The CIA is an incompetent bureaucracy, generally.

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

When I was director of the CIA, I knew that we had been - and I'm choosing my words very carefully here - effective in our expansion. We really had - expansion of government agencies and expansion of use of contractors. Effective, we were; efficient, we weren't. And so, as director of the CIA, I went after the inefficiencies part.

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.

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.

Washington’s largest industry is inertia.

The prize for ultimate inefficiency goes to America. We have built in so many checks and balances that our 'leaders' are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on Earth.

The Navajo Nation spends most of its time jumping through hoops.

There are counties where bribes must be paid in order to get anything done

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.

Despite the fact that the country was electing Republicans, Obama wasn't being stopped, and it's because of the political system. The political system has evolved into a giant bureaucracy, the primary purpose of which is self-preservation, not fixing anything.