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Bureaucracy and bureaucrats have always remained a subject of controversy.
Some quotes about bureaucracy believe it to be anti-democratic and power mongers while other quotes on bureaucracy talk about its efficiency and knowledge power.
Which side you are in?
Read the entire bureaucracy quote collection to know what the famous personalities and thinkers have got to say.
Best Bureaucracy Quotes and Sayings
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy, but an inevitable complement to it.
– Joseph A. Schumpeter
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
– Oscar Wilde
Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.
– Javier Pascual
Paperwork is the embalming fluid of bureaucracy, maintaining an appearance of life where none exists.
– Pobert Meltzer
The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.
– Karl Marx
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
– Mary Mccarthy
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
– Honoré de Balzac
A bureaucrat is an official who is clothed with power and whom it doesn’t fit.
– Evan Esar
Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.
– James Boren
There’s so much kind of bureaucracy involved with the whole concept of net neutrality and like technical stuff.
– Terry Gross
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
– Laurence J. Peter
Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it’s an almost losing battle against it.
– Dejan Stojanovic
Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.
– Dale Dauten
The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.
– Karl Marx
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
– Franz Kafka
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
– Oscar Wilde
Bureaucracy by its nature resists change and nullifies progress.
– James Cook
The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
– Brooks Atkinson
Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.
– Jaime Lerner
In any bureaucracy, there’s a natural tendency to let the system become an excuse for inaction.
– Chris Fussell
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
– Eugene J. McCarthy
Bureaucracies tend to grow and to brag about their growth based on how many individuals they have and how much money they spend.
– Darrell Issa
Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
– Charles Peters
Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.
– Alan Keyes
The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
– Alain De Botton
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
– Jerry Pournelle
Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is dehumanized, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.
– Max Weber
A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.
– Walter Bagehot
I hope you enjoy reading our bureaucracy quotes collection.
Also, which bureaucracy quote is your favorite, and what is your viewpoint?
Let us know in the comments!
