Top 60 Bureaucratic Quotes

Visas represent one bureaucratic obstacle, so to say and, if removed, might increase the inflow of Russian money into the Czech economy. And not only Russian money, but Russian tourists, Russian entrepreneurs and so on.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

The thing about local government is they want to hear what local people think, but for the most part, their systems are so long, dull and bureaucratic that people only get involved when there’s an issue they really care about.

We can’t afford to sacrifice another generation of American children to bureaucratic politics. We’ve got to get it done. The future, the health, the life – our nation depends on it and it’s just foolish to think or act otherwise.

The relatively unpredictable flow of funds to humanitarian organizations, and the bureaucratic strings often attached to them, can have a highly negative impact on an organization’s ability to plan and execute programmes effectively. We need to be able to rely on predictable income flows to plan sustainable programmes.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

I remember the moon landings, and Apollo was the paradigm by which all progress was measured at that time. And I knew that creating a true space-faring civilization was both possible and practical. What I failed to realize was that the effort would fail due to bureaucratic inertia and political apathy.

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.

Would-be adoptive parents have to struggle for years through a bureaucratic obstacle course at an average cost of $30,000.

I love cars; I like the idea of manufacturing something, having a product, a hard product to sell and promote, but as time went on, I recognized that car companies are so bureaucratic and so ossified that it would take forever to work your way up. And so I went into consulting.

The Indian education system, like the Indian bureaucratic system, is Victorian and still in the 19th century. Our schools are still designed to produce clerks for an empire that does not exist anymore.

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying… Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.

I joined the city government, and we start to operate as the bureaucrats on the local level, so we were the only ones in the whole Russian team who were experienced in practical bureaucratic management in the complicated condition of 1990.

You know that I am living proof that the American Dream is real. Growing up, our congressman cut through government bureaucratic red tape to help my mom buy our first house. That’s the kind of congressman I’ll be.

Europe is my home, Europe is my continent. Europe is where we live. The European Union is a political bureaucratic organization that took away our identity and our national sovereignty. So, I would get rid of the European Union and be a nation-state again.

Turner Broadcasting went from a very entrepreneurial, risk-taking company where I had a tremendous amount of freedom and autonomy to a corporate, bureaucratic nightmare.

For political and bureaucratic reasons, governments at all levels are telling far less to the public than to insiders about how to prepare for and behave in the initial chaos of a mass-casualty event.

I am not a creature of giant business and I think that small- and medium-sized businesses will derive the most benefit from the removal of bureaucratic obstacles to trade.

A cashless society promises a world of limitation, control, and surveillance – all of which the poorest Americans already have in abundance, of course. For the most vulnerable, the cashless society offers nothing substantively new; it only extends the reach of the existing paternal bureaucratic state.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it’s a big, bureaucratic place. Think ‘post office with spies.’

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.

The problem we are trying to solve is that of drugs that would have never seen the light of day for reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent properties of drug candidates themselves and more to do with bureaucratic institutions within which they often sit.

I just felt very isolated in France, a very bureaucratic place, no space for thinking in a different way, an artist’s way.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

It’s very complicated when you are reorganizing territories under different ministries. We have to get them all together and transfer jurisdictions. It’s a bureaucratic slalom course we have to ski through, but it can be done.

After my grandfather’s plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast and the airfield.

If you give the boss all the decision-making power, they see the world through their eyes. The big innovations are generally such a shift that they won’t see it. For a long time, it looked like it was just inevitable that you would get slow and bureaucratic.

Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we’ve known them.

The intelligence community really is a vast bureaucratic entity, and it has been politicized in ways that are not effective for the gathering of intelligence and giving it to senior policymakers.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

We’re at the crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is a proud, solid, reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.

The Defense Department is prone to all of the ‘traditional bureaucratic rules,’ which is the same thing you’ll find in most traditional government systems.

We want First Nations and these people to be like Canadians on a lot of points of view. Right now, that’s not normal that they cannot have running water on reserve. We need to fix that, but it must not be imposed by Ottawa, a top-down bureaucratic decision.

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

People are always saying it’s the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it’s a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it’s a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.

The new era of bottom-up politics has had politically paradoxical consequences in China. While it has made the system of governance more participatory, it has made the central government less authoritarian and, therefore, more bureaucratic and cautious.

My work is made on lines similar to those of a film production. A lot of my work is kind of bureaucratic, endlessly phoning up people, trying to find the cameraman and the lighting man, because I am a total technology-phobe, quite helpless with equipment.

The politics of Europe is unimaginative and bureaucratic.

As you move up a traditional, sort of bureaucratic structure, there’s a certain point at which you realize, ‘Well, I’m not really on the implementation or execution side – I’m not on the battlefield. I’m an operations person who’s overseeing multiple units that are out on the ground doing the job.’

In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a revolution that would end the abuses and injustices of capitalism and the privileges of a bureaucratic caste, collective faith does not exist.

Self-publishing provides more freedom and control, but it also provides more risk. Publishing provides more credibility and promotion, but your vision can also get lost in the bureaucratic machinery of the business. It’s a tough decision to make.

Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all – to different degrees – unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual’s effort and reward for that effort.

The difference between architecture and engineering comes in only with the creation of schools. It’s a bureaucratic distinction. The result of both disciplines is the construction of objects in a landscape.

Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

Unfortunately, bureaucratic problems at the federal level are causing many other small Washington companies to be denied federal funding that would help transfer their ideas from their laboratories into our homes and hospitals.

The home ownership process for Native Americans has been hobbled by bureaucratic delays and regulations.

I knew a gentleman who was 65 who had a consulting firm outside of Kansas City, Mo. I convinced him to sell me the business, which did auditing and reviewing of freight bill charges, for nothing down. It was a step out of working in this bureaucratic setting of corporate America and going out on my own in 1984.

All lawyers are going to have to – if we really want to attain civil justice – address the issue of how complicated we have made the laws: what we have done to ensnarl the American people in bureaucratic rules and regulations that make access to services or compliance with the law sometimes difficult, if not impossible.

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.

For many residents, the DMV is the face of state government – it is an office that virtually every adult needs to interact with and for far too long it has been overly bureaucratic, arduous, and – quite frankly – operating in the 21st century while relying on 20th century processes.

Since governmental quotas expand bureaucratic power, provoke a backlash and are unfair to individuals, we need to find a better way to increase minority opportunities.

In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies from making significant changes in a whistleblower’s ‘working conditions’ as punishment for speaking out.

I think that the point of being an architect is to help raise the experience of everyday living, even a little. Putting a window where people would really like one. Making sure a shaving mirror in a hotel bathroom is at the right angle. Making bureaucratic buildings that are somehow cheerful.

The identity of political donors should be disclosed and bureaucratic rules should not circumvent the original intent of federal law or interfere with the public’s ability to hold these organizations accountable.

OFSTED has made large cuts in the paperwork which schools are asked to provide and further steps to reduce the bureaucratic burden will be introduced in September.

Bureaucratic advancement means fewer peers, more span of control, generally an increasing information-pump function, and increased distance from the actual implementation of whatever it is the organization does.

For many of the brave men and women who have fought on the front lines, returning home means trying to navigate a complicated and bureaucratic Veterans Administration benefits system.

The only way that we can disincentivize Central American immigrants from illegally entering our country is if we change our policies, tweak our laws, cut the bureaucratic red tape and immediately send them back to their countries of origin. Until then, this self-imposed crisis will continue to worsen.

Congressional intervention and the availability of intervention demonstrably offset agency indifference; are a guard against arbitrary, improper, and illegal bureaucratic decisions; and provide the power of public pressure to require the nonelected official to be responsive.

It is through states that the American people get the job done every day, often in spite of a deeply flawed bureaucratic federal government.