In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government—the rule of offices, as contrasted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many—bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.
Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves.
The bureaucracy is the most dangerously hidebound and conservative force; if it ends up by constituting a compact body, which stands on its own and feels itself independent of the mass of members, the party ends up by becoming anachronist and at moments of acute crisis it is voided of its social content and left as though suspended in mid-air.
As specialists and bureaucrats, human beings become tools, able to make systems of exploitation and even terror function efficiently without the slightest sense of personal responsibility or understanding. They retreat into the arcane language of all specialists, to mask what they are doing and give to their work a sanitized, clinical veneer.
Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept.
Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts.
There are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country.
Project management has long been discussed by corporate executives and academics as one of several workable possibilities for organizational forms of the future that could integrate complex efforts and reduce bureaucracy.... This approach does not really destroy the vertical, bureaucratic flow of work but simply requires that line organizations talk to the other horizontally so work will be accomplished more smoothly throughout the organization
My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
Bureaucratic thought does not deny the possibility of the science of politics, but regards it as identical with the science of administration.
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.
Bureaucracy can have dehumanizing effect upon employees, making them more like machines, especially those at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy
Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity.
It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.
Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them.
Earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that 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. [...] 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 are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians.
Bureaucracy is [...] simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms.
Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
There comes a time in the history of all bureaucracies when they must inevitably parody their own functions.