{"quotes":[{"text":"Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["bureau","bureaucracy","bureaucratization","bureaucrats","cancer"],"id":4629,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.","author":"David Graeber","tags":["bureaucracy","structural-violence","stupidity"],"id":18025,"author_id":"David+Graeber"},{"text":"A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.","author":"Joe Haldeman","tags":["bureaucracy","military"],"id":20848,"author_id":"Joe+Haldeman"},{"text":"Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.","author":"David Brooks","tags":["bureaucracy","character"],"id":28471,"author_id":"David+Brooks"},{"text":"Younger managers learn quickly that, whatever the public protestations to the contrary, bosses generally want pliable and agreeable subordinates, especially during periods of crisis. Clique leaders want dependable, loyal allies. Thos who regularly raise objections to what a boss or a clique leader really desires run the risk of being considered problems themselves and of being labeled 'outspoken,' or 'nonconstructive,' or 'doomsayers,' 'naysayers,' or 'crepehangers.","author":"Robert Jackall","tags":["bureaucracy","leadership","management"],"id":29202,"author_id":"Robert+Jackall"},{"text":"As a result, amongst working-class Americans, government is now generally seen as being made up of two sorts of people: 'politicians,' who are blustering crooks and liars but can at least occasionally be voted out of office, and 'bureaucrats,' who are condescending elitists almost impossible to uproot.","author":"David Graeber","tags":["bureaucracy","politicians"],"id":29235,"author_id":"David+Graeber"},{"text":"Private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. Government loans will waste far more capital and resources than private loans. Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it.","author":"Henry Hazlitt","tags":["bureaucracy","foolishness","prosperity"],"id":44387,"author_id":"Henry+Hazlitt"},{"text":"It is as if we were to start hacking a path through the Amazon forest. By the time we have proceeded a hundred yards, the undergrowth takes over again.","author":"Edward Luce","tags":["bureaucracy","corruption","india"],"id":44414,"author_id":"Edward+Luce"},{"text":"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 from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.","author":"Mohsin Hamid","tags":["bureaucracy","government","state","states"],"id":44696,"author_id":"Mohsin+Hamid"},{"text":"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 makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.","author":"Simone Weil","tags":["bureaucracy","democracy","fascism","military","police"],"id":53990,"author_id":"Simone+Weil"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":89,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}