Walter Walker
Artist
"Britain has invented a new missile. It's called the civil servant - it doesn't work and it can't be fired."
Bureaucracy quotes
Bureaucracy
68 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Eugene McCarthy
Politician
"An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."
Albert Einstein
Physicist
"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work."
Jack Kerouac
Novelist, Poet
"When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!"
Hannah Arendt
Philosopher, Political Theorist
"Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside bureaucracy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Bureaucracy quotes (page 1 of 4)
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"the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is."
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"Remove the document—and you remove the man."
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"Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be true."
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"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem."
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"So many signatures for such a small heart."
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"Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer."
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"We must get rid of the IRS. It's a bureaucracy fraught with totalitarianism."
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"The civil servant is primarily the master of the short-term solution."
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"What comes after the revolution is inevitably bureaucracy. Whoever wins the revolution builds a bureaucracy"
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"Bureaucracy is adept at protecting its nest."
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"The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state"
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"We cannot meet 21st Century challenges with a 20th Century bureaucracy."
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"French is the language of diplomacy. Spanish is the language of bureaucracy."
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"The difficulty is no longer to find candidates for the offices, but offices for the candidates."
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"The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate."
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"Yet the proletariat has not only a vanguard, but also a rearguard, and besides the proletariat there are the peasantry and the bureaucracy."
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"Effective process is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is senseless process."
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"UN is made even more complex by the constant interplay of politics and bureaucracy and can certainly be bewildering for a novice."
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