Beaurocracy Quotes

“Most of the upper management of I.S. were undead. I always thought it was because the job was easier if you didn't have a soul.”
― Kim Harrison, Dead Witch Walking

“Drop dead-but first get permit”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“Politics doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt politics.”
― Amit Kalantri

“A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.”
― Eric Hoffer

“It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.”
― Karl Hess

“Through memory to knowledge on the way to stars that are stepping down to the stuffy rooms of modern bureaucrats, illuminating their ceilings, their horizons where everything is easily resolved by the piles of paper and recipes for how to live, create, run, eat, breathe, learn how to love, how to make love, how to sleep, how to dream, how happiness is achieved under the artificial stars of the new sky that emerged from the bureaucratic rooms of aspiring and impotent minds, unable to love, even though they had all their life to learn what they preach.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms

“Gleichzeitig wird die Illusion erzeugt, mit der Einhaltung der Compliance-Regeln sei auch eine gute Unternehmenaufsicht gewährleistet. Moralisch erwünschtes Verhalten lässt sich gerade nicht durch Vorschriften erreichen. Regeln stärken Regeltreue. Aber sie schwächen den moralischen Kompass, sie schwächen das Gefühl für Akzeptanz, sie Schwächen die Verantwortung — Verantwortung, die sich naturgemäß auf das Ungeregelte bezieht.”
― Reinhard K. Sprenger, Das anständige Unternehmen: Was richtige Führung ausmacht - und was sie weglässt

“The “self-actualization” philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Are you amplifying effort over effectiveness?”
― RICHIE NORTON