Forbes' Quotations on Bureaucrats

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

- Mary McCarthy


Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

 - Joseph Schumpeter


It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.

 - Barbara Ehrenreich


The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency.  An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

- Eugene McCarthy


Poor fellow, he suffers from files.

 - Aneurin Bevan


Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60.

- Frank Lloyd Wright


Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

- Samuel Butler


Bureaucratic time, which is slower than geologic time but more expensive than time spent with Madame Claude's girls in Paris.

- P.J. O'Rourke


Guidelines for bureaucrats:

1. When in charge, ponder.

2. When in trouble, delegate.

3. When in doubt, mumble.

- James Boren


We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming. 

- Wernher Von Braun


Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

 - Milton Friedman


I do not rule Russia.  10,000 clerks do.

- Nicholas I


On Soviet bureaucrats: They don't ask much of you.  They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you hate.

- Boris Pasternak


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

 - Hyman Rickover


Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

- Charles Peters


I love being a writer.  What I can't stand is the paperwork.

- Peter De Vries