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 women around them to clean up.

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 before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency.

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

In any bureaucracy, one soon learns that an error is never admitted. It is corrected as discreetly as possible.

The only thing that saves us from bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

...the sort of compromise one has to strike in dealing with a bureaucracy.

Sex in the hands of public educators is not a pretty thing.

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

Britain has invented a new missile. It's called the civil servant - it doesn't work and it can't be fired.

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

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

Although I can accept talking scarecrows, lions, and great wizards of emerald cities, I find it hard to believe there is no paperwork involved when your house lands on a witch.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

It's all papers and forms, the entire Civil Service is like a fortress made of papers, forms and red tape.

His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.

Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.

Up or out greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

In any bureaucracy, paperwork increases as you spend more and more time reporting on the less and less you are doing.