English Story

官僚quotations about bureaucracy

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
-- Dean Acheson

 

I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
-- Douglas Adams

 

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
-- Fred Allen

 

We trained hard - but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
-- Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.

 

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
-- Dave Barry

 

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
-- Milton Friedman

 

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
-- Hyman Rickover

 

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can't take part. And you've got to put your body upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.
-- Mario Savio, (1943-1996)