Catch-22 Power Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #10

Dr. Stubbs laughed with sardonic amusement at the prospect. "They think they can order sick call out of existence. The bastards." (10.47)

Another flaw of bureaucracy in Catch-22 is "ordering out of existence" whatever programs it does not like.

Quote #11

[Captain Black:] "The important thing is to keep pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean." (11.11)

Here is a prime example of indoctrination – the teaching of something by repetition to someone without explaining what it fully means. This is another flaw of a corrupt bureaucracy.

Quote #12

Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better. The fact that there were thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained the rank of major enlivened him in foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the other hand, the fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were already generals contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety…(19.2)

Colonel Cathcart embodies a fault of the bureaucracy – its lack of sound judgment and its inability to make decisions.