Bureaucracy is a system of administration associated with a high degree of specialization and a clearly defined division of labour, with tasks distributed as official duties.
Bureaucracy is a form that does not offer efficiency as such, but the reduction of uncertainty through the rational application of rules.
Bureaucracy is a system of administration whereby the goal is to find a rule for every conceivable situation so that leadership is unnecessary and no one ever need be in doubt about what the right thing to do is.
Bureaucracy is a circle from which one cannot escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with understanding of the general, and so all are mutually deceived.
Bureaucracy is a form which develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized', the more it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional.
Bureaucracy is (along with the police and the military) mankind's greatest adversary regardless of the form of government: It tramples all human values.
Bureaucracy is a significant threat to democracy because even the master of politics stands as an utter 'dilettante' opposite the 'expert'.