Life By Committee Quotes & Sayings

The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband. — Richard Russo

Harriet Thomas, a leader of the Women's Peace Party, startled the committee [debating the Espionage Act] when she told them, 'It seems to me that under this act I would be liable to imprisonment for life, or a more drastic penalty, perhaps, if I should say that I would rather my sons be shot for refusing to go out and kill and bear arms against a supposed enemy of this country.' A congressman interrupted her to ask, 'Then you do not honor your citizenship in this country?' Thomas stood her ground. 'I feel I have the right to interpret my loyalty to my own country in my own terms of citizenship, and according to my own conscience, and I do not need any bill to tell me what my of country shall represent. — Ernest Freeberg

We suppose that could be considered a hedged position for the awards committee, one that would never occur in the hard sciences such as physics and chemistry, where a prize shared among three with divergent views would be an embarrassing mistake or a bad joke. While a Nobel Prize might well be the culmination of a life's work, shouldn't the work accurately describe the real world? — Seth Klarman

Their attitude toward another aspect of organization shows the same bias. What of the "group life", the loss of individualism? Once upon a time it was conventional for young men to view the group life of the big corporations as one of its principal disadvantages. Today, they see it as a positive boon. Working with others, they believe, will reduce the frustration of work, and they often endow the accompanying suppression of ego with strong spiritual overtones. They will concede that there is often a good bit of wasted time in the committee way of life and that the handling of human relations involves much suffering of fools gladly. But this sort of thing, they say, is the heart of the organization man's job, not merely the disadvantages of it. "Any man who feels frustrated by these things," one young trainee with face unlined said to me, "can never be an executive". — William H. Whyte

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.'
-archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 2001 — Naomi Klein

A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. — Robert A. Heinlein

I think I'm comfortable making myself, or my speaker, larger than life if I can then cut myself off at the ankles. The way, in "My Major Prize," the speaker does this drippy performance of sadness and poetry for some unnamed prize committee, only he lets us know that it's all a wry game. — Randall Mann

If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a
problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the "splendor in the ordinary," and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage. — Eugene H. Peterson

Perhaps these men in the House Caucus Room [Committee on Un-American Activities] are determined to spread silence: to frighten those voices which will shout no, and ask questions, defend the few, attack cruelty and proclaim the rights and dignity of man ... America is going to look very strange to Americans and they will not be at home here, for the air will slowly become unbreathable to all forms of life except sheep. — Martha Gellhorn

Today's the day. The clock is ticking. I have been summoned to speak. I go before the committee with a chance to exonerate myself, to extricate, or at least explain the debacle that has become my life.
A statement, a simple speech, a song and dance that will set them straight, an incandescent incantation, a charming presentation, a shoe of sorts, the show of shows, it's the only chance I've got. My appeal must be appealing, not entirely revealing, tucking the tendency to be argumentative, artfully augmenting my audacity with the acuity of my observation and the alarming accuracy of my action. What can I possibly say or do? Act normal. — A.M. Homes

In 1960, for example, the Committee for Long Range Studies of the Brookings Institution prepared a report for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warning that even indirect contact - i.e., alien artifacts that might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the moon, Mars or Venus or via radio contact with an interstellar civilization - could cause severe psychological dislocations. The study cautioned that "Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior. — Stanley Kubrick

There are many ways of encouraging people to make life better other than joining a political party. Politics with a small 'p' isn't just about darkened committee rooms, endless meetings - it is about giving people the right to make decisions about our lives. — John Reid

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck. — Hilary Mantel

A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain. — Robert A. Heinlein

Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings. — John Twelve Hawks

When I'm sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas. It's like, "Good morning! Everything is shit! Time to act impulsively. But first let's start by getting into imaginary fights with people from the past. Next let's catalog everything that's wrong with you and your life. Also, I want to remind you of everything you don't have - and everything you should be scared of losing. Let's begin! — Melissa Broder

It's a fact of life that how you dress affects how you are perceived and whether your contribution to a meeting is registered as worth listening to. It was most alarming the way people's attitudes changed when I started wearing my designer suits to committee meetings. Obviously, it's not just the clothes that count; you have got to have something worth saying. But it si true that some people's views are dismissed before they speak because others perceive them as just a secretary! — Stephanie Ellis

I was a member of the Armed Services Committee for 18 years. I spent a big chunk of my life studying national security issues and our role in the world. — John Kasich

Little by litter life returned to normal. The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department - a whole government machinery.
Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers. — Elie Wiesel

Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings. — George F. Will

When people are going on to the next plateau of whatever this thing is called life, I also want them to breathe easily, even if it's the last one they take here with us. I guess I'm the welcoming committee and ushering committee. — Erykah Badu

The recommendation by the Arkansas Supreme Court Disciplinary Committee that President Clinton be disbarred is like a tender green shoot of integrity rising from the stinking junkyard of American public life. At last, some official body has come to a decision about Clinton's conduct that is untainted by politics, cowardice or cynicism. — Mona Charen

Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life ... Market fundamentalism, this madness that's infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days. The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that's all. What he doesn't understand is enterprises that don't make a profit, because they're set up to do something different. He doesn't understand libraries at all ... — Philip Pullman

It is strange how the romances of the teenage years retain a poignancy all through life - how a girl who turns you down when you're 16 retains an aura in your memory even long after you, and she, have ceased to be who you were then. I attended my high school reunion a couple of weeks ago and discovered, in the souvenir booklet assembled by the reunion committee, that one of the girls in my class had a crush on me all those years ago. I would have given a great deal to have had that information at the time. — Roger Ebert

You know, fate intervened. I went on to the DCMS committee to have a quieter life before the phone hacking scandal broke, and then ended up investigating the company that had libelled me previously when I was a minister. — Tom A. Watson

I think it's a very legitimate aspect of American life to criticize and to disagree and to debate. But I want to say I think it's a lie to say that the president lied to the American people. I sat on the Robb-Silverman Commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them-I said, 'Did-were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw?' Every one of them said no. — John McCain

Madam Speaker, I have spent more than half my life as a member of the Resources Committee. In that time I have supported numerous wilderness designations. In fact, I cannot recall ever opposing a wilderness bill. — Nick Rahall

That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years), this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what? — Aldous Huxley