bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it__ an almost losing battle against it.

The author describes the adoption process in which he and his wife participated as "a paperwork pregnancy".

To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.

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 do it._The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.

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 of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.

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.

The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition.

Many at the State Department think its their job, not the Army's, to develop cultural and regional expertise and relationships. In such quarters, the RAF concept looks less like an innovative approach to global risk management than yet another military effort to replace diplomats with soldiers.

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

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.

In a democracy government is the God.

State first, subject second, statesman last.

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?

Do you really understand all this army stuff?It helps not to be too bright, sir.

What is all this? Get him out of here, devil take me!_ And that one, imagine, smiles and says: __evil take you? That, in fact, can be done!_ And__ang!

Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.

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 lose my job as an interplanetary voyeur? I guess I'd have to use my master's degree for something else.''I remember when you were shy.''I'm space paparazzi now. The attitude comes with the job.

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