“Remember, the inevitable inefficiency of a huge bureaucracy will be working for you.”

— Robert Sheckley, book The Status Civilization

Source: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 20 (p. 84)

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Robert Sheckley114

American writer 1928–2005

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 3 (p. 62)

“God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

This statement is a rebuke to the famous assertion by William Cowper: "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm."
2000s
Context: It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza. … God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways.

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, The World As I See It (1949)

“Dinosaurs have a bad public image as symbols of obsolescence and hulking in inefficiency; in political cartoons they are know-nothing conservatives that plod through miasmic swamps to inevitable extinction.”

Robert T. Bakker (1945) American paleontologist

"Dinosaur Renaissance", Scientific American 232, no. 4 (April 1975), 58—78
Dinosaur Renaissance (1975)

“It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 13, “Fimbulwinter” (pp. 258-259)

“Always remember the objects you are working with.”

Samuel R. Delany book Equinox

Equinox (1973)
Context: Always remember the objects you are working with. When you make a bridge, remember you are putting steel on stone and dirt. … Some day you will write poems to a little girl: marks with ink on paper. … When you are making love, you are moving flesh against flesh. That is the basis of all magic. (p. 30)

“The first thing is that you’re always at a disadvantage, because a bureaucracy is funded by the public to have permanent people there who can relentlessly advocate for their own interest. And that’s the problem: when bureaucracy stops working for the public interest.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

International Journalism Festival http://www.journalismfestival.com/news/heather-brooke-antitrust-legislation-needed-to-keep-the-internet-free/ Interview with Fabio Chiusi, 12 April 2012. <br class="br">Attributed, In the Media

“Your own inner capabilities and potentials are more varied and powerful than you realize. The purpose of this book is to enable you to recognize and use them in daily life. You use them now, but in a subdued and inefficient manner. They work in spite of you.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: How To Develop Your ESP Power (1966), p. xvii

“If you remember the why, the how will work itself out.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: Hunt for Jade Dragon

“The worse the conditions of life the more productive the work, always provided you remember the work.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

Aphorisms

“Remember, the inevitable inefficiency of a huge bureaucracy will be working for you.”

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