Conference Table Quotes & Sayings

Everyone, no matter what kind of job he or she has, fantasizes about freaking out at work. How many corporate drones, stuck in a boring staff meeting, have had the sudden urge to jump on top of the conference table and start screaming obscenities? Strip off their clothes? Kiss the woman or man next to them? We all have. How many employees joke about shooting the boss or blowing the place up? I'm not suggesting we do any of these things, mind you, but let's not kid ourselves; we all have a little murder in our heart. — Steve Dublanica

Amy, Dan, and Nellie were sitting at a table in a conference room, examining reproductions of Franklin documents-some so rare, the librarians told her, the only copies existed in Paris.
"Yeah, here's a rare grocery list," Dan muttered. "Wow. — Rick Riordan

We were wrapping up our Monday morning Risk Committee meeting, which was basically twelve of the firm's most senior staff members sitting around the big conference table and voting on which cases to take and which to turn down. It was your typical undercaffeinated Monday morning gathering: stifled yawns and low energy, throat-clearing and doodling, and furtive glances at BlackBerrys. Except for Jay, who paced around the room because he couldn't sit still for more than five minutes. — Joseph Finder

Work that only comes from the head isn't any good ... You need to find a way to bring your body into your work ... If we start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking. — Austin Kleon

The [Dow-Alcoa and Alcoa-IG] negotiations [of 1929] reveal strikingly the technique of cartel diplomacy - the steady application of "pressure" and the resort alternatively to challenges and blandishments. The similarity to power politics in which trial by battle is a last resort is marked. The procedure discloses the vast gulf between big business in practice and the patterns of behavior assumed in a regime of free competition. It shows how the conference table superseded the market as the arena for decision making. — George W. Stocking

I sprinted into the conference room as my boss, and the owner of this law firm, Cherie Poitras, grabbed her client around the waist, a woman dressed to the nines in high heels and a cream suit. The woman had actually crawled up on the conference table and lunged for her husband. Cherie and I wrestled her off, but not before the husband's attorney put him in a headlock to keep him from strangling his soon-to-be ex-wife. Even in a headlock, the husband, a local politician who stressed the sanctity of marriage and traditional values, struggled to get at his wife, his arms and legs flailing around ... — Cathy Lamb

I don't think a Palestinian state is going to be created at a conference table; it will be created on the ground in the West Bank, and some day, a peace conference will ratify that which has been built on the ground. — Elliott Abrams

Washington is the only city in the world where you can go to a black-tie dinner and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference. — Hugh Newell Jacobsen

Perhaps Communists had wormed their way so deeply into our government on both the working and planning levels that they were able to exercise an inordinate degree of power in shaping the course of America in the dangerous postwar era. I could not help wondering and worrying whether we were faced with open enemies across the conference table and hidden enemies who sat with us in our most secret councils. — Mark W. Clark

Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin — Jonathan Sacks

She nodded a greeting and took a muffin and a cup of coffee. Then she left again. I took two muffins and an empty cup and a whole box of coffee. I figured I could prop it on the edge of the conference table with the spigot facing toward me. Refills as and when required. Like an alcoholic behind a bar. — Lee Child

All six of them sat on either side of the long oval conference table, strung out like strong, handsome beads on the string of my love. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Consciously or not, we feel and internalize what the space tells us about how to work. When you walk into most offices, the space tells you that it's meant for a group of people to work alone. Closed-off desks sprout off of lonely hallways, and in a few obligatory conference rooms a huge table ensures that people are safely separated from one another. — David Kelley

The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs. — Richard M. Nixon

Now do you see why war irritates me? It's always the same. A lot of people get killed, but in the end, the whole thing is settled at the conference table. The notion of having the conference first doesn't seem to occur to people. — David Eddings

Although all the major industrial countries and a multitude of business units participate in the world trade in chemicals, the forces of free competition do not rule the world markets. The techniques of business diplomacy frequently supplement and in some instances have supplanted independent decision making by separate producers in response to free market forces. The geographic and industrial areas within which particular companies will operate, the scale of their output, the prices of their products, the use or nonuse of their technology, have increasingly become objects of negotiation, subjects of national and international agreement. More and more the conference table has been taking the place of the market as a regulator if the chemical industries. — George W. Stocking

Leadership in today's world requires far more than a large stock of gunboats and a hard fist at the conference table. — Hubert H. Humphrey

My therapist shared a theory she had come across, and I liked it. It held that before making your next journey in this life, your soul sits at a large, circular conference table and chooses the souls who are going to be a part of your life. As for which particular people would be chosen, I figured they would be individuals from previous lives with whom there was still unfinished business. — Melissa Gilbert

I am living my dream because I get to work with my kids and watch them find their happiness. It's so rewarding - we brainstorm around a conference table and have a really great time doing it. — Kris Jenner

THE MEETING GOT under way as soon as Marshall walked into the room. He looked dignified and serious, and he was wearing a dark suit. There were three men at the conference table, across from him, from a company in Boston that was not quite as large as UPI, but very close, and its growth rate had been remarkable in the past two years. It was well on its way to becoming the largest corporation in the country and outstripping all its competitors. And all it needed now was a powerful leader at its helm. And everyone at its base in Boston had agreed that Marshall Weston was the one. They had no idea if he would consider leaving UPI, and they doubted it after fifteen years, but they had come to California to try and convince him to do it. And he was listening raptly to what they said. It was their second meeting in two days, and they were going back to Boston that night. Marshall — Danielle Steel

I am the last man in the world to say that the succor which is given us from America is not in itself something to rejoice at greatly. But I also say that I can see more in the knowledge that America is going to win a right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are discussed ... It would have been a tragedy for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all her influence and power. — David Lloyd George

Julie McGuire gazed intently from her table in the filled-to-capacity dining room of the Wyndham Hotel. The Love To Murder Mystery Conference had saved the best for last. New York Times bestselling author, Tyler Jensen, now approached the podium. His entire bearing commanded attention, from — Morgan Mandel

What changes that we can control will make this space more gracious?" The group can then reshape the room to suit their needs. At the Center office, we previously had one long table in the conference room bolted to the floor. It offered no flexibility so we removed this table and replaced it with three square tables. They can be configured into one large board table, a medium sized conference table or three smaller tables. We scale the size of the table to the number of participants in the meeting so everyone feels more intimately connected. — Patricia Hughes

Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese. — Dorothy Day

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields. — Winston S. Churchill

Agreeing completely, Zarya came to an abrupt halt as she saw the small side table that had been pulled out for them. "Small" being the operative word. It must have been an end table in the conference room. The chairs were tiny foldaways with stained gray cushions. And while the linens were clean, they, too, were stained in places. It was the ultimate slap in the face. But for Darling, she'd be throwing a tantrum over it. Instead, she smiled at the woman and graciously sat down while Maris followed suit. Never let them know how much they've hurt you. Don't give them the satisfaction. Her father had raised her on those principles and she held them tight. Starskas didn't flinch or bitch. They got even. Lady — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Blue Book was now under direct orders to debunk ... I remember the conversations around the conference table in which it was suggested that Walt Disney or some educational cartoon producer be enlisted in [the] debunking process. — J. Allen Hynek

When we get to the point, as we one day will, that both sides know that in any outbreak of general hostilities, regardless of the element of surprise, destruction will be both reciprocal and complete, possibly we will have sense enough to meet at the conference table with the understanding that the era of armaments has ended and the human race must conform its actions to this truth or die. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Duke said: "Paul, I'm doing a hateful thing, but I must." He stood beside the portable poison snooper that had been brought into the conference room for their breakfast. The thing's sensor arms hung limply over the table, reminding Paul of some weird insect newly dead. The Duke's — Frank Herbert

We had a big Cancer Team Meeting a couple days later. Every so often, a bunch of doctors and social workers and physical therapists and whoever else got together around a big table in a conference room and discussed my situation. (Not the Augustus Waters situation or the Amsterdam situation. The cancer situation.) — John Green

Today, you can look across the conference table at your co-workers and see the red-haired behemoth, the kid with the runny nose, the football team captain, the cheerleader, the geek with the taped horn-rimmed glasses, the ever-present bully, and of course, the comedian. Other than being advanced in age and maturity (which is always a matter of opinion), we're working with the same personalities that we've grown up with during recess on the playground ... — David R. Smat

Christ, Elizabeth! Get your head back in the game. You're here to do a job, not drool over a hunky Brit. In my hurry to put some distance between me and the sex god, my knees wobble. I clutch the edge of the conference table to keep from — Magda Alexander

Detente is a readiness to resolve differences and conflicts not by force, not by threats and sabre-rattling, but by peaceful means, at the conference table. — Leonid Brezhnev

Already, the brain consumed more than a quarter of the body's blood supply ... an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more - perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them. Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were times when, as he [Stone] sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he would see nothing more than a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table ... Just brains, sitting around, trying to decide how to outwit other brains, at other conference tables.
Idiotic. — Michael Crichton

Why can't the Arabs and Jews resolve their disagreements at the conference table like good Christians? — Warren Austin

To work for better understanding among people, one does not have to be a former president sitting at a fancy conference room table. Peace can be made in the neighborhoods, the living rooms, the playing fields, and the classrooms of our country. — Jimmy Carter

I hope we shall abolish war and settle all differences at the conference table I hope we shall abolish all hydrogen and atom bombs before they abolish us first. — Charlie Chaplin