Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that the real challenge is not understanding government operations, but rather finding ways to halt its often cumbersome processes.
P. J. O'Rourke humorously highlights a common sentiment regarding government inefficiency. The quote implies that navigating the complexities of government may be less daunting than the task of actually achieving meaningful change or reduction in its often overwhelming activities and regulations. This reflects a broader frustration with bureaucracy and the perceived tendency of governments to grow rather than serve the public efficiently.
Themes
GovernmentBureaucracyEfficiencyPoliticsChange
In practice
Example use cases
In a political debate about slowing down government regulations, this quote can illustrate the frustration with bureaucratic red tape.
More from P. J. O'Rourke
All quotes →Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Similar quotes
Men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves…. For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made.
Whittaker ChambersRead
Law and Order are the medicine of the body politic and when the body politic gets sick, medicine must be administered.
B. R. AmbedkarRead
Nothing could be more dangerous to the existence of this Republic than to introduce religion into politics
Robert Green IngersollRead
When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
Aaron SorkinRead
People talk about smart sanctions and crippling sanctions. I've never seen smart sanctions, and crippling sanctions cripple everyone, including innocent civilians, and make the government more popular.
Mohamed ElbaradeiRead
We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.
George SorosRead