Bureaucratic Stagnation Quotes

Government is the ultimate monopoly. And monopolies, as any economist will tell you, often breed complacency and a lack of innovation.

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

We are, always, reminded of the old saw: What would happen if the Soviet Union took over the Sahara Desert? Answer: Nothing for 50 years. After that there would be a shortage of sand.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

Too much power in any institution tends to stifle innovation.

Instead of fighting terrorism, we were fighting bureaucratic inertia, an implacable enemy.

I want you to learn nothing from government. This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this.

From Lady Carlisle's trip to Moscow in 1663 to Veronica Atkinson's tour of duty during the 1989 Romanian revolution, it is clear that very little has changed. Four hundred years of innovation, liberation, and improvement clearly bypassed the Foreign Office while making its rounds through Westminster.

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

A Senator of the United States … serves his people by joining in the petty squabbles that occupy so much time of the Senate today. I may have grown cynical from long service, but this is a tendency I do not like, and I sometimes think I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years and listen to it.

Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wave making.

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

Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. ...Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission

I was 55 and I realized that if I didn’t leave Congress then, I would have to stay there [till retirement]. I would not be able to do anything else. I left when I still could…. Besides. Congress had become like a Junior High School Lunchroom throwing food at each other.

All our public systems—administrative, justice, education, and political systems are closed systems designed to produce mediocrity.

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

The visionless officialized fatuityThat once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity.

None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers - a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.

I was told that consulates are all gobbled up long ago—that ... [a candidate's] only chance is the death or resignation of the present incumbents; and you know "few die and none resign.

Far too many government spending programs have gone years, even decades, without being reauthorized, leaving the American people less able to effectively review, rethink, and possibly eliminate government programs.

I have to say to the Government that you are not even getting nowhere fast - you are getting nowhere slowly.