How can you make sense of a place if it won’t hold still to be counted and even its colors aren’t fast? Their job was to imagine, never to know. The truth, as generations of directors had reminded their charges, would only get in the way.

She knew the power of bureaucracy well enough to be aware she had to sit and be admonished until this stranger felt she had expressed sufficient disappointment in a girl she would never have to see again.

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and...

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can’t think. The comedy of law’s sterile logic–large POISON signs warning against common sand,...

Uniformity in the common law, consisting of broad principles like the “reasonable person” standard, generally permits adjustment for the circumstances. This type of uniform principle is almost synonymous with fairness. Uniform application of a detailed rule, on the other hand, will almost always favor one group over another. p. 34

People and institutions that refuse to admit error eventually discredit themselves.

The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are...

There is no plea bargain policy. I think there were people here in the bureaucracy that didn’t want to make a deal. He was trapped.

One of the key characteristics of an elite corps is its susceptibility to those more powerful than itself. Elite power is naturally attracted to a power hierarchy and fits itself neatly, obediently into the one that promises the most personal benefits. Here is the Achilles’ heel of armies, police and bureaucracies.

for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.

We know a great deal of the bureaucracy was occupied in overseeing tribute labor for the state, so I suspect a large percentage of the quipu had to do with labor.

The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.

Wananchi wanapokosa huduma za muhimu za kijamii (kama vile afya, elimu, chakula, malazi, na ulinzi) ilhali wanalipa kodi, na wameajiri serikali kuwaendeshea nchi kwa kiapo cha uaminifu wa vitabu vitakatifu, watakosa imani na serikali yao! Vilevile wataathirika kiuchumi, kijamii na kisiasa, na vita itaweza kutokea kati ya wananchi na serikali, au wananchi kwa wananchi wataweza...

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

What we need to see are concrete measures aimed at getting the bureaucracy to pursue this objective, otherwise all this will be just more rhetoric.

Just three words? Nothing about his physical health? His equipment? His supplies?”You got me,’ she said. ‘He left a detailed status report. I just decided to lie for no reason.”Funny,’ Venkat said. ‘Be a smart-ass to a guy seven levels above you at your company. See how that works out.”Oh no,’ Mindy said. ‘I might...

After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France, and as Hegel had prescribed, with every house numbered so that bureaucratic government could pass its science to and collect...

Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work

But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I’m not the one being arrested.

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth Stupid fumbling.

A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure...

The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.

A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls...

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.

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.[Pournelle’s law of Bureaucracy]

The difference between the modern laws and those of the past is that wisdom is no longer a respected requirement and it has become secondary in importance to bureaucratic procedure.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

We . . . go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting.

The State is not the hope of the world; it is an institution grounded in the threat of violence, whether via capital punishments or petty bureaucratic intrusions.

Wie es im Zeitalter der Könige naiv gewesen wäre zu glauben, dass der erstgeborene Königssohn der zum Herrschen Geeignetste wäre, so ist es in unserer zeit naiv zu glauben, dass der demokratisch gewählte Machthaber der Geeignetste sein wird. Die Nachfolgeregelung ist kein Rezept für die Bestimmung des besten Machthabers, sie ist ein Rezept für die...

Serikali inayodhulumu wananchi wake ni hatari kuliko simba.

Ukiipenda sana nchi yako ni rahisi sana kuichukia serikali yake!

The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth.

Bureaucracy and regulation is something we need to fight in Europe.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic–love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for...

The NSA?””Yeah, they called and offered to help out. Same software they use for enhancing spy satellite imagery.”Venkat shrugged. “It’s amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone’s rooting for one man to survive.

In our time… a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed...

Ah. You know, people like you, Ogu, really have no idea what the real India is like. Especially you – South Delhi is such a vulgar place, and your only companion there is Pultukaku, you are bound to get an insane perspective on the real things – appalling poverty and even more appalling ignorance. But,...

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can’t because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here...

Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!” And—bang!

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid...

To him, one of the most fascinating historical aspects of governments was their complete disregard for governing. Governments were single-minded and interested only in increasing their control and any governance that came out of the government’s actions were purely coincidental. …. The lowest flunky as well as the most powerful bureaucrat was more interested in...

They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.

The obvious pollution occurring in many places – worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes far beyond clean-up and beautification, far beyond the stewardship of nature that is commanded by ancient religious tradition. Embracing the...

The striking thing is that WHO doesn’t really have the authority to do any of this. It can’t tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to...

One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred ‘experience’ on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main ‘experience’ involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation’s health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been...