bureaucracy

Trust is essential for our social wellbeing. Without trusting the good will of others we retreat into bureaucracy, rules and demands for more law and order. Trust is based on positive experiences with other people an it grows with use. We need to trust that others are going be basically reasonable beings.

...the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incomptence and lack of discipline--a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.

...culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy.

It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture and community cohesion; a certain hostility toward luxury; a belief that the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional.

It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Bureaucracy is the death of any achievement.

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.

Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellspring of initiative and creativity.

1. Never give a bureaucrat a chance to say no.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up.