“Committee: A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit to do the unnecessary.”
“Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.”
“A committee of one gets things done.”
“A committee is an animal with four back legs.”
“A technical objection is the first refuge of a scoundrel.”
“Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.”
“A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.”
“Committee--a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours.”
“A collection of a hundred Great brains makes one big fathead.”
“The State, that craving rookery of committees and subcommittees.”
“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.”
“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”
“A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.”
“The ideal committee is one with me as the chairman, and two other members in bed with the flu.”
“We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.”
“A conference is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.”
“The real process of making decisions, of gathering support, of developing opinions, happens before the meeting or after.”
“One of the reasons why the Ten Commandments are so short and to the point is the fact they were given direct and did not come out of committees.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity. We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.”
“I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.”