"We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors."
—Buckminster Fuller
"Citizendium is a wiki encyclopedia project aiming to create the world's finest free source of pointless bureaucracy. We are inviting the public to help create content, but with no active constables to approve your membership, well... good luck with that. We were supposed to have a "gentle guiding" role for experts, but Larry Sanger drove them all off, and, anyway, we'd need active constables if we were ever going to do any of that. Our contributors use their real names, and the whole project is largely vandalism-free, due to the lack of active editors."
—Rational Wiki, Citizendium FAQ
Admin is a total systems failure waiting to happen. It's an anal-retentive nightmare, a spiderweb of red tape, a morass of triplicate forms. If everyone in Admin followed "correct" procedure, Magadon would grind to a halt within a year. Most of the productive work that comes out of Admin is generated by employees who know how to work around the system. This methodology is self-perpetuating, so there's no way that Admin will ever clean up its act: doing so would require a ground-up restructuring of the entire division.
—Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Subsidiaries: A Guide To Pentex
Far from the congested queues of pilgrims, a billion serried ranks of scribes and lexmechanics toil in the depths of Terra, locked in enormous, candle-lit scriptoria, gathering numbers and records of a thousand years ago whose purpose has long been forgotten. Archives the size of continents delve deep underground in gloomy wings, their floors dusty with antiquity, sprawling with stacks of parchment, scrolls and data crystals that, in all likelihood, no one will ever see. Without insight or even the will to question what they do, these petty functionaries persevere thought the same repetitive tasks each and every day because that is, was, and ever shall be their lot.
The Imperium constantly strains under the weight of its own colossal bureaucracy, and all manner of vital bibelots of information are lost or misfiled through simple human error. Far from Terra, a planetary governor whose world is in uproar looks to the skies for sign of assistance, little knowing that his request for aid has been bound into the spine of an eight hundred page missive on lumen design. Elsewhere, an Imperial Fleet – hundreds of ships all told – hangs silent in interstellar space, because the documentation updating its orders has travelled from desk to desk, never reaching a recipient with sufficient authorisation.
— Warhammer 40,000: Codex - Inquisition
All these [1980's action movies] are informed by America's experience in The Vietnam War. The only way the American people could process our defeat in Vietnam was this narrative that our civilian leaders had abandoned our military. And that the military itself was noble, and had only been doing their jobs. And they were just "Our Boys," who could have won - and were winning, and did win - if it weren't for those contemptible politicians. And those politicians were personified in the form of the conniving staffer, the Princeton-educated cynical poll-taker who was secretly making decisions. This was the logic we went into the 80's with, because nobody could just stand up and say, "We lost in Vietnam because it was an Insurgent War and we were fighting a Tank War, and insurgents will win if they're on their home turf and have a reason to fight."
—- John Roderick
This society is largely governed by a complex and, to the outsider, almost labyrinthine system of bureaucracy. An army of officials and functionaries work tirelessly to keep the government running smoothly and ensure no citizens are allocated resources they cannot demonstrate a properly filed and triple-stamped need for.
—Flavor text for Byzantine Bureaucracy, Stellaris
"The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe."
— Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
