Primary navigation:

QFINANCE Quick Links
QFINANCE Topics
QFINANCE Reference
Add the QFINANCE search widget to your website

Home > Financial Quotes > Meetings

Financial Quotes

Meetings Quotes

  • "My period of greatest creative output was during my corporate years, when every meeting felt like a play date with coma patients. I would sit in long meetings, pretending to pay attention while writing computer code in my mind and imagining the anatomically inspired nicknames I would assign to my boss after I won the lottery."
    Scott Adams (1957–), US cartoonist and humorist
    Source: Wall Street Journal (August 6, 2011)
  • "A manager's ability to turn meetings into a thinking environment is probably an organization's greatest asset."
    Nancy Kline (1946–), US author, educator, and consultant
    Source: Time to Think (1999)
  • "I find that no matter how long a meeting goes on, the best ideas always come during the final five minutes, when people drop their guard and I ask them what they really think."
    Michael Eisner (1942–), US former CEO and chairman of Disney
    Source: International Management (April 1988)
  • "Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting."
    William Goldman (1931–), US screenwriter and novelist
    Source: Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), ch. 2
  • "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."
    Lewis Thomas (1913–1993), US academic, physician, and writer
    Source: “On Committees,” The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
  • "Outside of traffic, there is nothing that has held this country back as much as committees."
    Will Rogers (1879–1935), US actor, columnist, and humorist
    Source: Quoted in Will Rogers, His Life and Times (Richard M. Ketchum, 1973)
  • "Any committee that is the slightest use is a committee of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to."
    Katharine Whitehorn (1928–), British journalist
    Source: “Are You Sitting Comfortably?” Observations (1970)
  • "A meeting is an arrangement whereby a large number of people gather together, some to say what they really do not think, some not to say what they really do."
    Vladimir Voinovich (1932–), Russian novelist
    Source: The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1969), pt. 2, ch. 6
  • "Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded … However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
    J. K. Galbraith (1908–2006), US economist and diplomat
    Source: Ambassador's Journal (1969), ch. 5
  • "The length of a meeting rises with the number of people present and the productiveness of a meeting falls with the square of the number of people present."
    Eileen Shanahan (1924–2001), US journalist and author
    Source: Times Talk (1963)
  • "My life has been a meeting … one long meeting. Even on the few committees I don't yet belong to, the agenda winks at me when I pass."
    Gwyn Thomas (1913–1981), British dramatist and writer
    Source: The Keep (1961)
  • "What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary."
    Richard Harkness (1907–1977), US radio and television journalist
    Source: New York Herald Tribune (1960)
  • "No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), US writer
    Source: The Crack-Up (1945)
  • "A conference is a gathering of important people who, singly, can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done."
    Fred Allen (1894–1956), US comedian and satirist
    W. M. Martin was the president of the New York Stock Exchange.
    Source: Letter to W. M. Martin (January 25, 1940)

Back to top

Share this page

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Bookmark and Share

Related

Most Viewed

Recommended

Latest

 
QFINANCE www.qfinance.com