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"It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure."
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"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
"Twenty-first century medicine must not be confined to a twentieth-century bureaucracy."
"I believe in opening mail once a month, whether it needs it or not."
"Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law."
"The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine."
"Lefever describes his financing plan with modesty:"'Our detailed budget is realistic, but does not take into account the inflation that may occur before September 1983. The one place it could cut or reduce is item 7, the simultaneous interpreter services, if these services could be provided gratis by the U.S. government.'""In other words, the only way to make a saving on a U.S.-subsidized project is to take money out of another U.S.-subsidized column."
"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency."
"Now, come over here so I can pat you down.""But you don't have-" Percy stopped. "Uh, sure."He stood next to the armless statue. Terminus conducted a rigorous mental pat down."You seem to be clean," Terminus decided. "Do you have anything to declare?""Yes," Percy said. "I declare that this is stupid."
"I've never been married and I've no more desire to be married now than I ever have. I hate bureaucracy and I am not religious."
"Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace
"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
"The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."
"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."
"Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly."
"Bliss-a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious-lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."
"The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?"
"He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear. ... It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. ... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. ... But he could choose not to listen."
"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."
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