Bureaucracy

Bureaucracyis the organizational structure and set of regulations in place to control activity, usually in large organizations and government.

The bureaucratic culture which prompts us to view society as an object of administration, as a collection of so many 'problems' to be solved, as 'nature' to be 'controlled', 'mastered' and 'improved' or 'remade', as a legitimate target for 'social engineering', and in general a garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force (the gardening posture divides vegetation into 'cultured plants' to be taken care of, and weeds to be exterminated), was the very atmosphere in which the idea of theHolocaustcould be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion. ~Zygmunt Bauman

CONTENT:A - F,G - L,M - R,S - Z,See also,External links

Quotes

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress. ~ James H. Boren

Stupidity multiplies unnecessary procedure, intelligence decreases it; therefore stupidity is the more functional from the bureaucratic point of view. ~Theodore Dalrymple

• In every bureaucratic system the shifting ofresponsibilitiesis a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms ofpolitical science,that is, as a form ofgovernment—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.
  • Hannah Arendt,"Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," inResponsibility and Judgment(2003), p. 31.

• Le courant des affaires devant toujours s'expédier, il surnage une certaine quantité de commis qui se sait indispensable quoique congéable à merci et qui veut rester en place. La bureaucratie, pouvoir gigantesque mis en mouvement par des nains, est née ainsi.
  • As routine business must always be dispatched, there is always a fluctuating number of supernumeraries who cannot be dispensed with, and yet are liable to dismissal at a moment's notice. All of these naturally are anxious to be "established clerks." And thus Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pigmies, came into the world.
  • Honoré de Balzac,Les Employés[The Government Clerks], 1838, trans. James Waring; also known as Bureaucracy, or, A Civil Service Reformer.

• The bureaucratic culture which prompts us to view society as an object ofadministration,as a collection of so many 'problems' to be solved, as 'nature' to be 'controlled', 'mastered' and 'improved' or 'remade', as a legitimate target for 'social engineering', and in general a garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force (the gardening posture divides vegetation into 'cultured plants' to be taken care of, and weeds to be exterminated), was the very atmosphere in which the idea of theHolocaustcould be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion.
  • Zygmunt Bauman,Modernity and the Holocaust(1989)

• Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.
  • James H. Boren, inWhen in Doubt, Mumble: A Bureaucrat’s Handbook(1972)

• What bosses do: decapitate heads in the name of thefreedomof thefree markets.It’s bureaucracy terrorism—not different from the otherterrorismthat marches rampant in the streets—oh, bureaucracy terrorists name the other terrorists cowards, but what are they—sinister cowards—because they cripple your resources. They take away your office, your computer, and your friends.
  • Giannina Braschi,"United States of Banana" (2011). p.20

• Human bureaucracies, and most alien ones, are slow by design, their response times slowed to a crawl despite all the technologies we employ to make their progress visible to the naked eye. That’s because they’re still subject to all the delays native to organic life: the mistakes, indecision, the malice, the covering of asses, and the reluctance to transmit even the most urgent message until after a leisurely break for lunch.
  • Adam-Troy Castro,Emissaries from the Dead(2008),ISBN 978-0-06-144372-5,p. 206

• The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by acabalof its enemies.
  • Attributed toRobert Conquest[1],other multiple sources

• Stupiditymultiplies unnecessary procedure,intelligencedecreases it; therefore stupidity is the more functional from the bureaucratic point of view.
  • Theodore Dalrymple,"How Dare You Volunteer!"(2021)

• 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.
  • Erich Fromm,The Art of Loving(1956)

G - L

As specialists and bureaucrats, human beings become tools, able to make systems ofexploitationand 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. ~Chris Hedges

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. ~Frank Herbert

Besides, the paper pushers refuse to let the world end until every form is turned in, timestamped and properly initialed. Apocalypse is the last gasp of bureaucracy. ~Richard Kadrey

There are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country. ~John Kerry

My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. ~C. S. Lewis

• Bureaucracy is where fun goes to die.
  • the characterPhilippa Georgiouin the episode"Far From Home" of Season 3 ofStar Trek: Discovery
• Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as ameritocraticsystem is. The first criterion of loyalty to anyorganizationis thereforecomplicity.Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power.... As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true.
  • David Graeber,The Utopia of Rules(2015)

• The bureaucracy is the most dangerously hidebound andconservativeforce; 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.
  • Antonio Gramsci,inSelections from Prison Notebooks(1971) edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith

• As specialists and bureaucrats, human beings become tools, able to make systems ofexploitationand 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.
  • Chris Hedges,"Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse,"Truthdig,May 24, 2015

• Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more thaninnovation,especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept.
  • Frank Herbert,Heretics of Dune(1984)

• Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading itsinfluenceand itspower.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.
  • Herbert Hoover,campaign speech in New York, 22 October 1928

• Besides, the paper pushers refuse to let the world end until every form is turned in, timestamped and properly initialed.Apocalypseis the last gasp of bureaucracy.
  • Richard Kadrey,Still Life with Apocalypse,inJohn Joseph Adams(ed.)Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse,p. 163

• There are moreagriculturebureaucrats than there arefarmersin this country.
  • John Kerry,Washington Times(16 January 2004)

• Project managementhas long been discussed bycorporate executivesandacademicsas 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 lineorganizationstalk to the other horizontally so work will be accomplished more smoothly throughout the organization
  • Harold Kerzner(1982)Project management for executives.p. 2

• My symbol forHellis something like the bureaucracy of apolice stateor the offices of a thoroughly nastybusiness concern.
  • C. S. Lewis,The Screwtape Letters(1942)

M - R

• Bureaucraticthoughtdoes not deny the possibility of thescienceofpolitics,but regards it as identical with thescience of administration.
  • Karl Mannheim,Ideology and Utopia(1929), translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (1936)

• The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat toliberty.
  • Eugene McCarthy,quoted inTimemagazine, 12 February 1979

• Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form ofdespotism.
  • Mary McCarthy,"The Vita Activa",The New Yorker(18 October 1958)

• A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.
  • John Stuart Mill,On Representative Government(1861), Ch. VI

• Bureaucracy can have dehumanizing effect upon employees, making them more like machines, especially those at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy
  • Gareth Morgan(1986)Images of Organization,p. 35

• The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting — so that the big people don't always win — is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy. And with the bureaucracy comes the territoriality — which is again grounded inhuman nature.
  And the incentives are perverse. For example, if you worked forAT&Tin my day, it was a great bureaucracy. Who in the hell was really thinking about the shareholder or anything else? And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody else's in-basket. But, of course, it isn't. It's not done until AT&T delivers what it's supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies.
  They also tend to become somewhat corrupt. In other words, if I've got a department and you've got a department and we kind of share power running this thing, there's sort of an unwritten rule: "If you won't bother me, I won't bother you and we're both happy." So you get layers of management and associated costs that nobody needs. Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They're too slow to make decisions and nimbler people run circles around them.
  The constant curse of scale is that it leads to big, dumb bureaucracy — which, of course, reaches its highest and worst form in government where the incentives are really awful. That doesn't mean we don't need governments — because we do. But it's a terrible problem to get big bureaucracies to behave.
  • Charlie Munger,A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business. Speech at USC Business School(1994). (p. 8 of 24)

• Oncegeniusis submerged by bureaucracy, anationisdoomedto mediocrity.
  • Richard Nixon,ceremonyawarding Rickover his rank as Four-star Admiral(3 December 1973)

• It is increasingly clear that thefateof theuniversewill come to depend more and more onindividualsas the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.
  • Edna O'Brien,New York Times Book Review(14 February 1993)

• Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them.
  • P. J. O'Rourke,All the Trouble in the World(1994)

• Earthis still going round thesun,and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
  • George Orwell,"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,"Tribune(12 April 1946)

• Whendespotismhas established itself for ages in a country, as inFrance,it is not in the person of the king only that it resides.It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so inpracticeand infact.It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its despotism, founded uponcustomand usage. Every place has its Bastille, and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the king, divides and sub-divides itself into a thousand shapes and forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case inFrance;and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endlesslabyrinthof office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress.It strengthens itself by assuming theappearanceofduty,and tyrannises under the pretence of obeying.
  • Thomas Paine,The Rights of Man(1792)

• Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
  • C. Northcote Parkinson,"Parkinson's Law",The Economist,19 November 1955.

• The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
  • C. Northcote Parkinson,Parkinson's Law: and Other Studies in Administration(1957), p. 24. (popularly known asParkinson's Law of Triviality)

• In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
  • Laurence J. Peter,The Peter Principle(1968), ch. 1
• Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
  • Laurence J. Peter,Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time(1977), p. 83

• Thestate—or, more precisely, the Communist Party—has no choice but to accommodate this new class because it depends on it to stay in power. And underCommunism,the officialdom grows by leaps and bounds for the simple reason that inasmuch as all aspects of national life, the economy very much included, are taken over by the state, it requires a large bureaucracy to administer it. This bureaucracy is the favorite scapegoat of every Communist regime, yet none can manage without it. In theSoviet Union,within a few years of theBolshevik coup d’état,the regime began to offer unique rewards to its leading cadres, which in time evolved into thenomenklatura,a hereditary privileged caste. This spelled the end of the ideal ofequality.Thus to enforce the equality of possessions it is necessary to institutionalizeinequalityofrights.The contradiction between ends and means is built into Communism and into every country where the state owns all the productive wealth. True, periodic attempts have been made to shake off the grip that the Communist officialdom secured on the state and society.LeninandStalintried purges, which under Stalin led tomass murder.Maolaunched his “Cultural Revolution”to destroy entrenchedpartyinterests. None of these attempts succeeded. In the end, the nomenklaturas won out because without them nothing would work.
  • Richard Pipes,Communism: A History(2003)
• 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.
  • Jerry Pournelle,Chaos Manor View 408 (3 April 2006)

• If you are going tosin,sin againstGod,not the bureaucracy.God willforgiveyou but the bureaucracy won't.
  • Hyman G. Rickover,quoted inThe New York Times(3 November 1986)

S - Z

• In sharp contrast to the modus operandi of swarm dynamics, political bodies are ill-equipped to protect the integrity of their components and lack the collective wisdom for synchronization. Instead, highly layered command-based systems invade,institutionalize,and indoctrinate society with centralized directives, straitjacket bureaucracies, and self-serving officialdom. These systems hungrily feast on what others have created, cannibalizing other people’s resources like a tribe of pragmatic headhunters.
  • L.K. Samuels,In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action,Cobden Press, (2013) p. 35

• The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow.
  • Charles Sheffield,Rogueworld(1983), reprinted inThe Compleat McAndrew(2000),ISBN 0-671-57857-X,p. 240

• Forecastingby bureaucrats tends to be used foranxietyrelief rather than for adequate policy making.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb,The Black Swan(2007)

• I meant the petitions to provoke thought, to create discussion, but I underestimated theinertiain the system. I forgot that inertia is what bureaucracies are all about!
  • Sheri S. Tepper,Sideshow(1992),ISBN 0-553-56098-0,p. 323

• How easily weIndianssee the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poortotalitarians.
  • Shashi Tharoor,The Great Indian Novel(1993), p. 373
• Bureaucracy is [...] simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms.
  • Shashi Tharoor,The Great Indian Novel(1993), p. 398

• Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
  • Leon Trotsky,The Revolution Betrayed(1936), p. 41

• There comes a time in the history of all bureaucracies when they must inevitably parody their own functions.
  • Roger Zelazny,Isle of the Dead(1969), Chapter 3

See also

• Corporation
• Government
• Law
• Management
• Rational-legal authority
• State
• Technocracy