Quotes on Committees

Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities - a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.

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.

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.

Any committee is only as good as the most knowledgeable, determined and vigorous person on it. There must be somebody who provides the flame.

Governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students. And if you remove their discretion, it stops working.

The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. She was seen one dag sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who were just out of her reach. She was telling them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw; but the sparrows kept their distance.

When the Nobel Committee chose to honor me, the road I had chosen of my own free will became a less lonely path to follow.

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

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

When you want to work for God start a committee. When you want to work with God start a prayer group

Our world today is in need of peace, tolerance and brotherhood. The values of the Olympic Games can deliver these to us. May the Games be held in peace, in the true spirit of the Olympic Truce. Athletes of the 80 national Olympic committees, show us that sport unites by overcoming national, political, religious and language barriers. You can show us a world we all long for.

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.

I have a job I'm pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive.

I've said many a time that I think the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives was the most un-American thing in America!

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.

I hope that your committee will not permit doubt as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation

I have left my balls to Robespierre and my legs to Couthon. That should help the Committee of Public Safety for a while.

The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.

In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee.