Good Colleagues Quotes & Sayings

You can't change the world alone - you will need some help - and to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the good will of strangers and a strong coxswain to guide them. — William H. McRaven

At this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women'srights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues. — Virginia Gildersleeve

Take, for instance, studies from the past decade examining the impacts of exercise on daily routines.4.10 When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It's not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. "Exercise spills over," said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. "There's something about it that makes other good habits easier. — Charles Duhigg

Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection. — Richard Dawkins

As individuals, we will be judged in our lives by the totality of our actions. Not one thing will stand out. And I think that's how we get judged by our colleagues and that's how we get judged by the good lord. — Rahm Emanuel

It could be argued that all leadership is appreciative leadership. It's the capacity to see the best in the world around us, in our colleagues, and in the groups we are trying to lead. It's the capacity to see the most creative and improbable opportunities in the marketplace. It's the capacity to see with an appreciative eye the true and the good, the better and the possible. — David Cooperrider

Many of my colleagues are not able to run their family budget. On the other hand, I look at some of the apparatchiks in research councils, and I have even less trust in their abilities. Good intentions have always paved the road to hell. — Andre Geim

Teamwork is not a matter of persuading yourself and your colleagues to set aside personal ambitions for the greater good. It's a matter of recognizing that your personal ambitions and the ambitions of the team are one and the same. That's the incentive. — Greg Brown

In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that. — Margaret J. Wheatley

A good place to start a more civil dialog would be for my Republican colleagues in the House to change the name of the bill they have introduced to repeal health care reform. The bill, titled the "Repeal the Job Killing Health Care Law Act," was set to come up for a vote this week, but in the wake of Gabby's shooting, it has been postponed at least until next week. Don't get me wrong - I'm not suggesting that the name of that one piece of legislation somehow led to the horror of this weekend - but is it really necessary to put the word "killing" in the title of a major piece of legislation? — Chellie Pingree

I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future. — Van Jones

It is understandable that there has been a good deal of joking about purely learned works of this type. Their actual value for the future of scholarship and for the people as a whole cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, scholarship, as was true for art in the olden days, must indeed have far-flung grazing grounds, and in pursuit of a subject which interests no one but himself a scholar can accumulate knowledge which provides colleagues with information as valuable as that stored in a dictionary or an archive. — Hermann Hesse

show simply facilitates a crossing of paths between people who love each other very much, but who've become estranged by misunderstanding." "But how can you gauge that? I mean, whether or not a, um, Convergence is a good idea?" "Well," said Sashi. "Essentially, I talk to you, and then my colleagues will conduct a number of conversations with Lorelei, both on-screen and off. And with anyone else who's relevant and wants to participate in the healing. Then we make a decision. We would — Caeli Wolfson Widger

So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to "be twice as good," which is to say "accept half as much." These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I've seen so many people - loved ones and colleagues - who jump from one diet to the next, one exercise regimen to the next . I was trying to figure out what were some of the basic things that each of us can build into a lifestyle for good, instead of bouncing from one thing to the next. — Tom Rath

Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with the figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior. — David Halberstam

An effective technology advocate is someone who possesses strong communication skills and who has the respect of his or her colleagues. The technology advocate needs to be able to communicate with both the Office of Technology & Information Systems and their colleagues about various technology projects and plans. The building technology advocate will facilitate communication between your department and the staff at his or her building. A technology advocate does not need to be the most tech-savvy person in the building, but a good understanding of technology is vital for success in the position. — Mike Daugherty

My organization, my colleagues and I, are paid to run hotels in good times and fair times. We're professionals. That's what we do. I don't give a damn about the short-term market implications. — Steve Wynn

I occasionally find myself debating with computer science colleagues whether work on the more applied side can form the basis for good academic computing research. In my view, it clearly can, as long as it yields something sufficiently novel and important concerning computing. — Paul S. Rosenbloom

When your boss and colleagues care enough to invest in your health, it is good for you and the business. — Tom Rath

Business colleagues who have not seen each other for a long time but who have a good relationship can always shake hands warmly and grab each other's right upper arm or shoulder with their free left hand. Men and women executives should not kiss each other in public. — Letitia Baldrige

Successful women are not liked. I think the biggest danger for women in science is colleagues who are not as good as you are. — Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

They were more than colleagues. Triumphs of discovery, promotion, and publication were celebrated, but so were weddings and births and the accomplishments of their children and grandchildren. They traveled together to conferences all over the world, and many meetings were piggybacked with family vacations. And like in any family, it wasn't always good times and yummy cheesecake. They supported one another through slumps of negative data and grant rejection, through waves of crippling self-doubt, through illness and divorce. — Lisa Genova

Since Michael died I think I've worked constantly. Friends and colleagues are very sustaining. They're the people who get you through it ... It's no good to be on your own. — Judi Dench

Both my parents said they never got so many emails from friends and colleagues - with all the theater work that I've done - than when I was on 'The Good Wife.' — Sarah Steele

It seemed a church committee needed an architect to build a bridge "over a very dangerous and rapid river." Designer after designer failed, until one boasted - to the horror of his priggish benefactors - "I could build a bridge to the infernal regions, if necessary." The chairman assured his shocked colleagues: "he is so honest a man and so good an architect that if he states soberly and positively that he can build a bridge to Hades - why, I believe it. But," he admitted, "I have my doubts about the abutment on the infernal side!" Henry Villard could not help noticing "Lincoln's facial contortions" as he reached the story's moral: "So," he concluded, when "politicians said they could harmonize the Northern and Southern wings of the democracy, why, I believed them. But I had my doubts about the abutment on the Southern side. — Harold Holzer

A well-dressed, self-assured business executive steps into a quiet corner of the conference room, crowded with people. Everyone there is aware of her presence. She's dark-haired, petite, and alluring. She is quick to smile, and when she does, her whole face lights up. Her enthusiasm is infectious. Young men and women nod as they pass by, briefly breaking off their conversations with colleagues. The executive looks down at her compact electronic device and quickly texts: "Smile. Talk into the mic. Good luck. — Jill Bryant

One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues' failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. "I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas," he said. "It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. — Susan Cain

That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents). — Alexander McCall Smith

I'm excited that more people, especially men, are understanding that equality is good for them. I don't want men to want equality for women because they're being nice to their colleagues and daughters. I want men to want it because it's better for their companies and their lives. — Sheryl Sandberg

My colleagues, while it is good that the Nation is finally focused on the critical issue of securing our ports, our rhetoric and our passion about Dubai must be matched by the funding necessary to keep our ports and our citizens safe. — Allyson Schwartz

The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passers-by such as me who think it the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postal mark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back. — Bill Bryson

Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners ... If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything ... Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another. — Neal Stephenson

I like stand-up. But I'd also like a family and house and a yard. I want to work with a lot of people, have colleagues; and on good film sets, there's people there that work with the same people for years and years. I love that collaborative spirit in that medium. Comedy is a lot more solitary. — Demetri Martin

The thing is, you cannot ask people to coexist by having one side bow their heads and rely on a solution that is only good for the other side. What you can do is stop blaming each other and engage in dialogue with one person at a time. Everyone knows that violence begets violence and breeds more hatred. We need to find our way together. I feel I cannot rely on the various spokespersons who claim they act on my behalf. Invariably they have some agenda that doesn't work for me. Instead, I talk to my patients, to my neighbors and colleagues
Jews, Arabs
and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and we are all fed up with the violence. — Izzeldin Abuelaish

Most days what I felt was this: the minute you put a first name and a last name together, you've got a pair of tusks coming right at you (i.e., Watch out, buddy). but on days when I didn't disapprove of everything on principle
days when the whole cologned, cuff-shooting ruck of my co-workers didn't repulse me from the moment they disembarked from the sixth-floor elevator and began squidging their way along the carpeted track that led to the office
my thinking stabbed more along these lines: a name belittles that which is named. Give a person a name and he'll sink right into it, right into the hollows and the dips of the letters that spelled out the whole insultingly reductive contraption, so that you have to pull him up and dance him out of it, take his attendance, and fuck some life into him if you expect to get any work out of him. Multiply him by twenty-two and you will have some idea of what the office was like, except that a good third of my colleagues were female. — Gary Lutz

I know," she said, "rejection's not easy. But you reject words, whole pages, long impossible stories, and it feels good once it's done. It's no different rejecting pictures, a picture's right to hang on a wall. And most of these have hung here too long; you don't even see them any more. The best stuff you have, you don't see any more. And they kill each other because they're badly hung. Look, here's a thing of mine and here's your drawing, and they clash. We need distance, it's essential. And different periods need distance to set them apart - unless you're just cramming them together for the shock effect! You simply have to feel it ... There should be an element of surprise when people's eyes move across a wall covered with pictures. We don't want to make it too easy for them. Let them catch their breath and look again because they can't help it. Make them think, make them mad, even ... Now we'll give our colleagues here better light. Why did you leave so much space right here? — Tove Jansson

When I see someone not performing, I am frank enough to tell the person that it's not working out. I request him or her to leave or change jobs within the group. But I see many of our senior colleagues, including my brothers, sons and nephews, empathetic towards non-performers. They don't want to face the issue. They tend to become comfortable with such people and they get protection. They tend to choose people who become personally loyal to them rather than to the company. I think it's important to be professional about such matters. Protecting a non-performer is not good for the business and also the person being protected. This is unprofessional too. The non-performer may be in the wrong job and thus not doing what he or she is best at doing. Empathy that results in protection would lead to a negative result for the employee as well. He or she might be better off in another job within the group or elsewhere. — Subhash Chandra

One of my colleagues in Birmingham University, where I come from,' said Trevair, 'is a moral philosopher. He taught me that one of the ways to judge a course of action is to consider what company it puts one in. I doubt if that's very good philosophy, but I find it a good rule of thumb. — Jill Paton Walsh

For while anyone can sit back and point to the bottom line as justification, assessing instead a person's actual knowledge and actual ability takes confidence, thought, good judgement, and, well, guts. You can't just stand up in a meeting with your colleagues and yell, "Don't fire her. She was just on the wrong end of a Bernoulli series." Nor is it likely to win you friends if you stand up and say of the gloating fellow who just sold more Toyota Camrys than anyone else in the history of the dealership, "It was just a random fluctuation. — Leonard Mlodinow

Having had the good fortune to serve beside her on both courts, I can attest that her opinions are always thoroughly considered, always carefully crafted and almost always correct (which is to say we sometimes disagree). That much is apparent for all to see. What only her colleagues know is that her suggestions improve the opinions the rest of us write, and that she is a source of collegiality and good judgment in all our work. — Antonin Scalia

There was danger at times that women might not be judged by the highest standards, but more leniently because of their sex. "She is a remarkably good chemist
for a woman," you might hear a man say. It seemed to me essential, if the ablest young women scholars were to achieve the best work of which they were capable, that they should be held to the most rigorous standards ... To advance, a woman must do at least as good work as her male colleagues, usually better. — Virginia Gildersleeve

I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. — Robertson Davies

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication ... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done. — Peter Drucker

Contingent on what, though? Some bases for feeling good about oneself may be worse than others. Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and her colleagues have shown that the prognosis is particularly bad when self-esteem hinges on outdoing others (competitive success), approval by others, physical appearance, or academic achievement.47 Consider the last of those. When children's self-esteem rises or falls with how well they do at school, achievement can resemble an addiction, "requiring ever greater success to avoid feelings of worthlessness." And if it looks as though success is unlikely, kids may "disengage from the task, deciding it doesn't matter, rather than suffer the loss of self-esteem that accompanies failure. — Alfie Kohn

Are the rules more important to you than friendship?"

" 'Friendship' is a strong word. I'd prefer 'good relationship between colleagues.' "

She proffered this expression with ingenuous, affable calm. — Amelie Nothomb

If someone can't behave with their colleagues and can't be part of the culture, it doesn't matter how good they are at what they do; they have to be asked to leave. — Bob Diamond

Our restaurant fostered a sense of camaraderie in a number of ways besides sharing the same nickname of 'chef.' Initially, we bonded through training. Once we opened, we worked in teams each night, meaning that we not only knew our colleagues well, we depended on them. Most importantly, we all had 'family meal' together every night, just like President Bush recommended to all families so that their children would have good values and grow up to be gun-toting, pro-life, pro-death, gas-guzzling, warmongering, monolingual, homophobic, wiretapped, Bible-thumping, genetically engineered, stem-cell harboring, abstinent creationists. Oops, I think I just lost all of my red state readers. To make up for it, I'll let you lose my ballot. — Phoebe Damrosch

And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life. — Lisa Unger

Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others. — Nigel Cumberland

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers. — John C. Maxwell

When I asked my boss if he would refer me to someone in London where I was going next, he replied, "If you are really good, then we would not want you to leave. If you are bad, then we would not refer you. If you are just so so, why should we bother?" So he did not do anything. Luckily his boss, a Swiss manager, felt compelled to notify his London colleagues that I was going to be in town. And thus I got hired. — Philip Tan

Yes. I'm a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm. — Ben Goldacre

I have always had extraordinarily good relations with very conservative colleagues. And that's not because I agree with any of them or fudge on my positions, but people feel I listen to them and give them the benefit of the doubt. I assume the best of people. And that, I think, is an attitude that is maybe rare in politics. — Barack Obama

Some of my unhappiest moments have been in organizations. Somehow it seems to be quite respectable to do things in organizations that you would never do in private life. I have had people insult me to my face in front of colleagues. I have had my feelings rammed down my throat on the pretext that it would do me good. I have been required to do things which I didn't agree with because the organization wished it ... In my worst moments I have thought organizations were places designed to be run by sadists and staffed by masochists. — Charles Handy

The Rising was mainly a piece of streat theatre designed by poets for dramatic effect. For better or worse, it became part of the founding myth which states need - but which they should move on from after a time. Major John MacBride, in a cameo performance in which he left Jacobs Mill, as he had entered it, immaculately dressed down to the white spats, told his colleagues Next time lads, don't shut yourself up behind four walls. It was good advice. — Maurice Hayes