Quotes about paperwork

A collection of quotes on the topic of paperwork, thing, people, doing.

Quotes about paperwork

“So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn't received and that might have been eaten by gargoyles.”

Terry Pratchett book Snuff

Source: Snuff

Reading

“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989), p. 203.

World, Imagination, Nostalgia

“If possible, try to avoid pushing each other over the edge, as that would cause me extra paperwork.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

“I’d signed six things and my stack wasn’t getting any smaller. It was like the paperwork was breeding while I worked.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Rises

“Zebrowski says that if you killed someone else just hide the body, he's not starting over on the paperwork.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Incubus Dreams

Source: Incubus Dreams

“I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

“I'm going to shoot somebody," Maddie said.
"Sawyer hates when people do that. It's a whole bunch of paperwork.”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: Simply Irresistible

Hate, People

“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”

Peter de Vries (1910–1993) American editor and novelist

Love

“Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else—cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments—as long as the paperwork’s filled out properly. And in on time.”

Connie Willis Bellwether

Source: Bellwether (1996), Chapter 4 “Rapids”, Section 1 (p. 140)

Forgiveness, Time

“Part of it, which perhaps you and most other observers are not aware, is that I have enough passive income, and enough dispassion for conventional status signaling, that my marginal utility of money is pretty low compared to my disutility for doing busywork. To put it in perspective, I quit my last regular job in 2002, and stopped doing consulting for that company as well (at $100/hour) a year later when they merged with Microsoft and told me I had to do a bunch of paperwork and be hired by Microsoft's "independent consulting company" in order to continue.”

Wei Dai Cryptocurrency pioneer and computer scientist

In a discussion thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jter3YhFBZFYo8vtq/look-for-the-next-tech-gold-rush#ikKBYevf2aL2pBwsS on LessWrong, July 2014

Money, Parting

“They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U. S. international–U. S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U. S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups. So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff.”

Russ Tice (1961) former intelligence analyst

As told to Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frog Post News, which is the website of Sibel Edmonds, a high-level FBI whistle-blower NSA Whistleblower: NSA Spying On – and Blackmailing – Top Government Officials and Military Officers, Fox News, 2013-06-20 http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/06/20/nsa-whistleblower-nsa-spying-%E2%80%93-and-blackmailing-%E2%80%93-top-government-officials-and-military,

People, World, Law, Intelligence

“It takes real sangfroid to stare death out. Planning your own murder is a delicate undertaking, requiring as much foresight and paperwork as that invested by some girls into their first weddings.”

Antonella Gambotto-Burke book The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

Source: The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide (2004), P. 93.

Death, Girl, Wedding

“Man does not live by bread alone, nor guns, paperwork, theses, naked practicalities.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Gibraltar Falls (p. 118)
Time Patrol

“There will be paperwork, no government action can occur without it, but that can come later.”

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 38, “Loose Ends” (p. 354)

“The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative, He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself.”

C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993) British naval historian

Cited in:Lionel G. Titman (1990), The Effective Office: A Handbook of Modern Office Management. p. 117
In-laws and Outlaws, (1962)

Life

“The idea is to generate paperwork. The word could hardly be more apt. Paper is work. Paper is the big employer. Someone fills out a form (in triplicate), someone files one copy, the other copy goes somewhere else to be filed by someone else, the third is retained by the customer for his records. The most insignificant transaction must be scrupulously recorded and logged, filed and stored, even, on occasion, retrieved. On a trip to Libya, p. 183.”

Geoff Dyer (1958) English writer

Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It (1993)

Idea

“They think the privateer’s life one of nothing but adventure, violence, evasion, and escape. But, between letters of marque, bills of lading, rosters, inventories, and plunder contracts, it involves, in fact, more paperwork than any thing else.”

David D. Levine (1961) science fiction writer

Source: Arabella and the Battle of Venus (2017), Chapter 9, “Fleur de Lys” (p. 135)

Life, Thinking

“First off, I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don't really mind). I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need? The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better. I simply didn't need to start a commercial company. And it's just about the least interesting thing I can even imagine. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn't take care of employees if I tried. A company that I started would never have succeeded – it's simply not what I'm interested in! So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting, and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

-- 8/15/07 -- http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/TechGovernment/News.asp?id=44682&PageMem=2 --
Attributed

Life, Hate, People, World

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) German, later an American, aerospace engineer and space architect

"On Bureaucracy", Chicago Sun Times (10 July 1958), as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations, 2nd edition (2012), by Carl C. Gaither and Alma E. Cavazos-Gaither, editors, p. 925

“Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

The Desktop Regulatory State (2016), Chapter 2
The Desktop Regulatory State (2016)

People, Way, Behavior, Nature

“I was shamed into helping the unborn after 12 years of silence, in 1986. Since then, my only client has been the unborn. I don't work for a movement. I don't work for a party. I don't work for candidates. I work for the unborn, and I don't give a flying flick about what people want to do on paper with bylaws, and all that kind of stuff, because it's just like the Pharisees, who had all their rules about the Sabbath, but they didn't know that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath! I will stand for the unborn, and I will not relent! I don't know Mr. Clymer, but Howard Phillips has lost ALL of my respect, because he stands for people who want to kill ONE, only ONE, innocent child, and that's all that counts! If you want ONE innocent child, GO with this man, but I'll tell you what- I've got my paperwork filled out. All it lacks is my signature, and my wife's signature, and we're the hell out of here, if you vote to stay with a national party that will put up with ONE dead baby, much less many thousands of dead babies. And you sir [pointing at Jim Clymer] need to repent! Because the blood will be on your hands when you stand before God. You won't be able to argue about procedural votes, and keeping the party together before God! You'll be standing there quaking in your boots, wishing you'd washed yourself in the blood of the Lamb. That's all I've got to say…The only thing that matters to me is doing my job to stop the killing of the unborn.”

Paul deParrie (1949–2006) American activist

The Last Words of Paul deParrie http://www.constitutionpartyoregon.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=111&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

God, People, Hell, Silence

“I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting. I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things. Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Love, Life, Secret, Idea

“Our post-Hannah Arendt imaginations are haunted by the wrong figure: for every owl-eyed, mild-mannered pen-pusher clinically shuffling the euphemistic paperwork of oblivion, there were a hundred noisily dedicated louts revelling in the bloodbath. The gas chambers, our most enduring symbol of the catastrophe, were in fact anomalous: most of those annihilated did not die suddenly and surprised as the result of a deception, but only after protracted humiliations and torments to whose devising their persecutors devoted inexhaustible creative zeal.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator', a review of Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Imagination

“Simulation systems (mathematical models, philosophical thought experiments) that don’t have real world applications are like SPACs - shells with all the paperwork in place till something operational is ready to merge into them.”

Anand Gandhi (1980) Indian film director

World, Mathematics