Top 100 Quotes About Committees
#1. The American Jewish Committee has pioneered the German-Jewish-American dialogue.
Klaus Kinkel
#2. Being chic not only takes a great deal of money but an enormous amount of time. It practically precludes everything else, even being on charity committees. Half of one's time goes getting chic, the other half being seen that way.
Elizabeth Hawes
#3. What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
#4. Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.
Matt Taibbi
#5. To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a design committee of bureaucrats.
Henry Spencer
#6. A modern world, with so many choices for women, yet still very much a man's world, with little
place for compassion or community or flowery skirts. No, it was a world of business suits and
lawsuits, of committees and careful conversations.
Debotri Dhar
#7. Committees can criticize, but they cannot create.
David Ogilvy
#8. Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody.
Rory Bremner
#9. The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V.S. Pritchett
#11. In every committee of twelve, one will love you and one will betray you.
Lyle E. Schaller
#12. Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.
Alan Bullock
#13. As Mayor, I will fully support my Arts Commission and its professional selection committees so that they can commission a full range of public art that is daring and, when appropriate, daringly traditional.
Gavin Newsom
#14. Public money should be spent on art but through individuals not committees.
Antony Gormley
#16. The more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of committees you might as well be dead.
Stella Benson
#18. When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government.
Bob Dole
#19. A single vision is more perfect than a committee vision because with everyone having their say, it becomes compromised.
Karl Pilkington
#20. Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.
Laurence J. Peter
#21. As a member of both the energy and environment committees, I am constantly astounded by how many of my colleagues prefer to focus on what the government can do for the nuclear or coal industries rather than why the government should support clean and sustainable energy.
Bernie Sanders
#22. Without bureaus, committees, officials or emissaries to manufacture sentiment in his favor, without intrigue or effort on his part, Grant is the candidate whose supporters have never threatened to bolt.
Roscoe Conkling
#23. If Moses had operated through committees the Israelites never would have got across the Red Sea.
William Booth
#24. Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.
Mark Twain
#25. I would rather deal with a tyrant any day than a committee. Committees, as a general rule, aren't willing to take chances, which is why you have a committee in the first place - so you can share the blame.
Hal Riney
#26. Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
Peter Drucker
#27. I can't say that my disability has helped my work, but it has allowed me to concentrate on research without having to lecture or sit on boring committees.
Stephen Hawking
#28. Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
William Monahan
#29. First of all, let it be remembered that I speak as an ex-Communist and one who has not testified before Congressional Committees, nor written works on the Communist conspiracy.
Dorothy Day
#30. Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick.
Vladimir Nabokov
#31. Parliamentary committees are becoming more independent, tactics are becoming more sophisticated, and industries that don't want to be bushwhacked by some damaging legislative amendment will have to spend more time and money watching the Hill.
John Ibbitson
#32. I think ultimately audience members like to see someone controlling the quality of a film. A lot of films you see are made by committees and studios and producers.
John Carney
#33. Let's form a committee tasked with exploring why committees are so ineffective. Then we'll stand-back and watch it argue and self-destruct.
Ryan Lilly
#34. We have almost a city has probably two or three hundred committees. Every committee is dealing with just one problem and has nothing to do with the other problems.
Alvar Aalto
#35. We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.
Charles Stross
#36. Success brings with it pressure to conform. I always thought that success would lead to freedom, but the opposite is true: more people get involved, and committees make decisions, and it becomes a fight to stay free.
Nick Park
#37. I think any advocate who is effective has fully acquainted himself or herself with the legislator they are going to meet. Know what committees they are on, what issues they are interested in, all in an effort to build a bridge for communicating with them.
Mark Shields
#38. I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#39. Actors are a lot like professors on dissertation committees - it's a lot of ego, a lot of rallying for position, there is a lot at stake in every single interaction.
Mayim Bialik
#40. The minute somebody joins a committee ... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.
P. J. O'Rourke
#41. A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.
Fred Brooks
#42. As debate is rare in the House of Representatives, since nearly all real business is done in the committees, it is very natural that such debate as there is should be very oratorical, should be
D. W Brogan
#43. I hated teaching composition. I was playing music I didn't particularly want to play, being on committees I didn't want to be on.
Richard Rodney Bennett
#44. The Poor Peasants' Committees are necessary to fight the kulaks, the rich, the exploiters, who shackle the working peasants.
Vladimir Lenin
#45. Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.
James W. Loewen
#46. A committee, of course, exists for the purpose of damping enthusiasms.
Stella Benson
#47. The information that follows is taken primarily ... from government hearings and reports published from various Senate and House committees.
G. Edward Griffin
#48. When we look at the situation in Ferguson, Missouri and the tragic death of Michael Brown, we are reminded of the importance of who we elect to our city councils, who sits on our local board of education committees, who we pick to represent us in Congress, in the Senate and more.
Al Sharpton
#49. In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. 'Search the parks in all your cities You'll find no statues of committees.
David Ogilvy
#50. A surprising number of government committees will make important decisions on fundamental matters with less attention than each individual would give to buying a suit.
Herman Kahn
#51. Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio or television.
Richard Dawkins
#52. For many years I have advocated 'redesigning Parliament' in a variety of ways - elect the Senate, do away with the 'confidence convention,' permit freer voting, strengthen the role of back benchers and committees, do away with ineffectual 'take note' debates, restructure question period, and so on.
Preston Manning
#53. A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one ...
Mary Parker Follett
#54. I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless.
Walter Legge
#55. We tend to think of politicians as time-servers and slackers. But on those committees they usually have an interest in the subject. And they're quite clever. I've seen them pick people apart.
Mark Thomas
#56. Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want, popular committees.
Ernest Mandel
#57. the late 1940s, hospitals in many states set up abortion committees to which a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy could appeal.9 It was a humiliating process, which could involve multiple physical examinations and interrogations by unsympathetic doctors.
Katha Pollitt
#58. Every time the Russians throw an American in jail, the Committee throws an American in jail to get even.
Mort Sahl
#59. It is a building designed by committee: all they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over.
Max Barry
#60. If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#61. There is no more great men; there is only great committees.
Marshall McLuhan
#62. I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares.
William Bateson
#63. Not even Sen. [Joseph] McCarthy was able to repress ideas he opposed as effectively as Harvard's hiring committees have suppressed the conservative viewpoints they despise and fear.
David Horowitz
#64. Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.
James Connolly
#65. We always had a central committee. They were mesmerized by Eldridge Cleaver.
Huey Newton
#66. It is well known that the Nobel Committees bring world opinion to a focus, and that fact still further enhances the prestige attaching to the Prizes.
Robert Robinson
#67. It is necessary to get a lot of men together, for the show of the thing, otherwise the world will not believe. That is the meaning of committees. But the real work must always be done by one or two men.
Anthony Trollope
#68. Living movements do not come out of committees.
John Newman
#69. African runners regularly work out in the United States and Europe, and the International Olympic Committee sends some of the cash from the Games to Olympic committees in poor nations, which use the money to finance their own programs.
Alex Berenson
#70. In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquium, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world's oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.
Amor Towles
#71. They cannot count on the press and they cannot count on Congressional committees to bring the problems of the scientific community to their own attention, or to police the scientific community.
Serge Lang
#72. The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.
Celia Green
#73. Movies are always made by committees, and the writer is not at the head of the committee. Thus, mush.
Jane Espenson
#74. This thing has been studied to death by Republicans and Democrats: several committees, including in Congress, that have all said, 'Yes, of course what happened was tragic, but Secretary Clinton was not in any way at fault,' and what you have here with these e-mails is basically a witch hunt.
Julian Castro
#75. It was also my idea that the advisory committees of the Academy should replace the legal committees of the German Reichstag, which was gradually fading into the background in the Reich.
Hans Frank
#76. Even better, there were established two separate committees deciding on state film funding.
Andrzej Wajda
#77. Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body.
Felix Frankfurter
#78. There's a host of difficult issues here, and that's why when you mentioned at the top of the show that the committees were looking at this, that's where I think we should be going.
Angus King
#79. Students of American history will recall that the important place where work gets done in the legislative body, almost without exception, is in the committees, more so than on the floor although sometimes more attention is paid to the floor.
Paul Sarbanes
#80. Good literacy skills can help children:
-Be healthy and safe.
-Do their homework to their best ability.
-Get and keep a job one day.
-Eventually participate in local committees or government
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#81. If I am elected leader, my shadow opposition team will actively incorporate the policy contributions of all our members by instituting policy action committees as recommend by the 2010 National Review.
Bill Shorten
#82. Outside of traffic, there is nothing that has held this country back as much as committees.
Will Rogers
#83. I want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee.
Joseph Pulitzer
#84. A curious observation is the uniform way that committees review curriculum for each field of study. Too often, authorities have a knee-jerk impulse to declare that 'all curriculum areas will be the same.' In fact, real and significant differences exist between fields of study.
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
#85. A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.
C. Northcote Parkinson
#86. The Nobel award occasions a unique celebration of the vision of science by the public at large. The prestige the prize confers today is largely due to the extraordinary diligence of the Nobel committees.
Kenneth G. Wilson
#87. The high esteem in which the Nobel Prizes are held is undoubtedly due to the conscientious way in which the Committees have discharged a heavy responsibility.
Ernest Walton
#88. Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.
David Ogilvy
#89. Avoid committees and consensus in developing big, distinctive business model advantages. Individuals have big, distinctive ideas; committees and consensus turn big, distinctive ideas into mundane ideas.
Bob Herbold
#90. You can't build a strong corporation with a lot of committees and a board that has to be consulted every turn. You have to be able to make decisions on your own.
Rupert Murdoch
#91. A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.
Storm Jameson
#92. Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking, 'Which candidate are Americans more ready for: a white woman or a black man?'
Gloria Steinem
#93. Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.
Henry A. Kissinger
#94. One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren't a way to make a living.
Kurt Vonnegut
#95. We do not need committees but we need commitment. The nation is already reeling under the burden of several committees formed in the last decade.
Narendra Modi
#96. Being chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee is like being a mosquito in a nudist colony.
John McCain
#97. A committee grows organically, flourishes and blossoms, sunlit on top and shady beneath, until it dies, scattering the seeds from which other committees will spring.
C. Northcote Parkinson
#98. Because of our Congressional committee system, our government is closer to a gerontocracy than a democracy.
Charles Frankel
#99. They've done away with those committees. That shows the success of what the Soviets were able to do in this country.
Ronald Reagan
#100. They sit there in committees day after day, And they each put in a color and it comes out gray. And we all have heard the saying, which is true as well as witty, That a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.
Allan Sherman
