Keyword: Bureaucracy

Any bureaucracy reorganized to enhance efficiency is immediately indistinguishable from its predecessor.

A sure sign of bureaucracy is when the first person who answers the phone can’t help you.

In a bureaucracy, accomplishment is inversely proportional to the volume of paper used.

In a bureaucracy, good ideas go to too far.

In a bureaucratic hierarchy, the higher up the organization the less people appreciate Murphy's Law.

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

(1919 – 1990) educator & writer

Typesetters always correct intentional errors, but fail to correct unintentional ones.

An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.

Only a bureaucracy can fight a bureaucracy.

If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented, it wasn't worth doing.

The spirit of public service will rise, and the bureaucracy will multiply itself much faster, in time of grave national concern.

Give a civil servant a good cause and he’ll wreck it with cliches, bad punctuation, double negatives and convoluted apology.

(1928 – 1999) British politician & diarist

Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest amount of hot air.

If anything can go wrong, it will do so in triplicate.

A giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

(1799 – 1850) French novelist & playwright

If the first person who answers the phone cannot answer your question, it's a bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is based on a willingness to either pass the buck or spend it.

To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem.

An inexorable upward movement leads administrators to higher salaries and narrower spans of control.

You should have seen it when I got it.

Bad regulation begets worse regulation.