Quotes about bureaucracy

The ceiling fell? The ink ran dry? A student dared to smile?

Of every new disaster

I prove myself the master

By sending out more circulars, more circulars to file!

A missing kid? A kissing kid? A paper on the floor?

For every major crisis

One remedy suffices:

More circulars, more circulars, to put into a drawer!A crowded cafeteria?

A substitute's hysteria?

A visitor from Syria?

A missing Book Receipt?I merely send out circulars

To add to other circulars

To add to other circulars

Numerical and neat!

The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.

Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.

He’d got good at the bureaucratic infighting, too, the sort of quiet warfare that measured itself as much by things prevented as by those accomplished.

Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted. Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question.

But, as often happened, the official and the real had only a nodding acquaintance with each other.

“The War Department has all sorts of opinions,” he said, sneering as he had when Dowling announced the Roosevelt was there. “A few of them bear a discernible relation to the real world—but only a few, mind you.”

“The Holy Spirit will guide the assembled fathers to the truth,” the magistrianos said confidently. Being a veteran of years of bureaucratic infighting, he added, “Of course, we may have to help things along a bit.”

The Barnacles were a very high family, and a very large family. They were dispersed all over the public offices, and held all sorts of public places. Either the nation was under a load of obligation to the Barnacles, or the Barnacles were under a load of obligation to the nation. It was not quite unanimously settled which; the Barnacles having their opinion, the nation theirs.

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving — HOW NOT TO DO IT.

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.

How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. That is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action.