Conference Table Quotes

The [Dow-Alcoa and Alcoa-IG] negotiations [of 1929] reveal strikingly the technique of cartel diplomacy - the steady application of "pressure" and the resort alternatively to challenges and blandishments. The similarity to power politics in which trial by battle is a last resort is marked. The procedure discloses the vast gulf between big business in practice and the patterns of behavior assumed in a regime of free competition. It shows how the conference table superseded the market as the arena for decision making. ~ George W. Stocking

I don't think a Palestinian state is going to be created at a conference table; it will be created on the ground in the West Bank, and some day, a peace conference will ratify that which has been built on the ground. ~ Elliott Abrams

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields. ~ Winston S. Churchill

All six of them sat on either side of the long oval conference table, strung out like strong, handsome beads on the string of my love. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Now do you see why war irritates me? It's always the same. A lot of people get killed, but in the end, the whole thing is settled at the conference table. The notion of having the conference first doesn't seem to occur to people. ~ David Eddings

Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin ~ Jonathan Sacks

I am the last man in the world to say that the succor which is given us from America is not in itself something to rejoice at greatly. But I also say that I can see more in the knowledge that America is going to win a right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are discussed ... It would have been a tragedy for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all her influence and power. ~ David Lloyd George

I sprinted into the conference room as my boss, and the owner of this law firm, Cherie Poitras, grabbed her client around the waist, a woman dressed to the nines in high heels and a cream suit. The woman had actually crawled up on the conference table and lunged for her husband. Cherie and I wrestled her off, but not before the husband's attorney put him in a headlock to keep him from strangling his soon-to-be ex-wife. Even in a headlock, the husband, a local politician who stressed the sanctity of marriage and traditional values, struggled to get at his wife, his arms and legs flailing around ... ~ Cathy Lamb

What changes that we can control will make this space more gracious?" The group can then reshape the room to suit their needs. At the Center office, we previously had one long table in the conference room bolted to the floor. It offered no flexibility so we removed this table and replaced it with three square tables. They can be configured into one large board table, a medium sized conference table or three smaller tables. We scale the size of the table to the number of participants in the meeting so everyone feels more intimately connected. ~ Patricia Hughes

Although all the major industrial countries and a multitude of business units participate in the world trade in chemicals, the forces of free competition do not rule the world markets. The techniques of business diplomacy frequently supplement and in some instances have supplanted independent decision making by separate producers in response to free market forces. The geographic and industrial areas within which particular companies will operate, the scale of their output, the prices of their products, the use or nonuse of their technology, have increasingly become objects of negotiation, subjects of national and international agreement. More and more the conference table has been taking the place of the market as a regulator if the chemical industries. ~ George W. Stocking

Why can't the Arabs and Jews resolve their disagreements at the conference table like good Christians? ~ Warren Austin

We were wrapping up our Monday morning Risk Committee meeting, which was basically twelve of the firm's most senior staff members sitting around the big conference table and voting on which cases to take and which to turn down. It was your typical undercaffeinated Monday morning gathering: stifled yawns and low energy, throat-clearing and doodling, and furtive glances at BlackBerrys. Except for Jay, who paced around the room because he couldn't sit still for more than five minutes. ~ Joseph Finder

She nodded a greeting and took a muffin and a cup of coffee. Then she left again. I took two muffins and an empty cup and a whole box of coffee. I figured I could prop it on the edge of the conference table with the spigot facing toward me. Refills as and when required. Like an alcoholic behind a bar. ~ Lee Child

The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Perhaps Communists had wormed their way so deeply into our government on both the working and planning levels that they were able to exercise an inordinate degree of power in shaping the course of America in the dangerous postwar era. I could not help wondering and worrying whether we were faced with open enemies across the conference table and hidden enemies who sat with us in our most secret councils. ~ Mark W. Clark

Blue Book was now under direct orders to debunk ... I remember the conversations around the conference table in which it was suggested that Walt Disney or some educational cartoon producer be enlisted in [the] debunking process. ~ J. Allen Hynek

When we get to the point, as we one day will, that both sides know that in any outbreak of general hostilities, regardless of the element of surprise, destruction will be both reciprocal and complete, possibly we will have sense enough to meet at the conference table with the understanding that the era of armaments has ended and the human race must conform its actions to this truth or die. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

My therapist shared a theory she had come across, and I liked it. It held that before making your next journey in this life, your soul sits at a large, circular conference table and chooses the souls who are going to be a part of your life. As for which particular people would be chosen, I figured they would be individuals from previous lives with whom there was still unfinished business. ~ Melissa Gilbert

Christ, Elizabeth! Get your head back in the game. You're here to do a job, not drool over a hunky Brit. In my hurry to put some distance between me and the sex god, my knees wobble. I clutch the edge of the conference table to keep from ~ Magda Alexander

I am living my dream because I get to work with my kids and watch them find their happiness. It's so rewarding - we brainstorm around a conference table and have a really great time doing it. ~ Kris Jenner

THE MEETING GOT under way as soon as Marshall walked into the room. He looked dignified and serious, and he was wearing a dark suit. There were three men at the conference table, across from him, from a company in Boston that was not quite as large as UPI, but very close, and its growth rate had been remarkable in the past two years. It was well on its way to becoming the largest corporation in the country and outstripping all its competitors. And all it needed now was a powerful leader at its helm. And everyone at its base in Boston had agreed that Marshall Weston was the one. They had no idea if he would consider leaving UPI, and they doubted it after fifteen years, but they had come to California to try and convince him to do it. And he was listening raptly to what they said. It was their second meeting in two days, and they were going back to Boston that night. Marshall ~ Danielle Steel

Leadership in today's world requires far more than a large stock of gunboats and a hard fist at the conference table. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

I feel nothing."
Crouching down beside her, Bercelak took a cloth from off the table and placed it over the wound. "Nothing? You feel no pain?"
"Oh. I feel pain. Lots of pain. But nothing else. ~ G.A. Aiken

My tears simply broke through the fragile wall
that had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me. ~ Arthur Golden

I leaned across the table towards the crumb-thrower. "Do that again," I said, loud enough to be heard over the opera singer, Dolly, my mother, and the smell of the breadsticks, "and I will sell your firstborn child to the devil. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds. ~ Sam Kean

Food is about being happy
at a table, thats probably where we spend most of our happiest hours ... ~ Ferran Adria

My first trip to China, in 1995, was among the most memorable of my life. The Fourth World Conference on Women, at which I declared, "Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights," was a profound experience for me. I felt the heavy hand of Chinese censorship when the government blocked the broadcast of my speech, both throughout the conference center and on official television and radio. Most ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Did you ever notice how very fickle males are?" she asked the horse. "And how very foolish females are about them?" she added, aware of how inexplicably deflated she felt. She realized as well that she was being completely irrational-she had not intended to come here, had not wanted him to be waiting, and now she felt almost like crying because he wasn't!
Giving the ribbons of her bonnet an impatient jerk, she untied them. Pulling the bonnet off, she pushed the back door of the cottage open, stepped inside-and froze in shock!
Standing at the opposite side of the small room, his back to her, was Ian Thornton. His dark head was slightly bent as he gazed at the cheery little fire crackling in the fireplace, his hands shoved into the back waistband of his gray riding breeches, his booted foot upon the grate. He'd taken off his jacket, and beneath his soft lawn shirt his muscles flexed as he withdrew his right hand and shoved it through the side of his hair. Elizabeth's gaze took in the sheer male beauty of his wide, masculine shoulders, his broad back and narrow waist.
Something in the somber way he was standing-added to the fact that he'd waited more than two hours for her-made her doubt her earlier conviction that he hadn't truly cared whether she came or not. And that was before she glanced sideways and saw the table. Her heart turned over when she saw the trouble he'd taken: A cream linen tablecloth covered with crude china, obviously borrowed from Charise's h ~ Judith McNaught

For half a century, the Sunset Strip was the asphalt timeline of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I'll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive, where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun. ~ Steve Erickson

There is so a real poem," said Fatima, annoyed. "The real Conference of the Birds was written by someone, by a real person. He had certain intentions. I want to know what they are. He wrote the poem for a reason, and the reason matters."

"Does it?" Vikram stretched his toes, revealing a row of claws as black as obsidian. "Once a story leaves the hand of its author, it belongs to the reader. And the reader may see any number of things, conflicting things, contradictory things. The author goes silent. If what he intended matter so very much, there would be no need for inquisitions, schisms and wars. But he is silent, silent. The author of the poem is silent, the author of the world is silent. We are left with no intentions but our own. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ~ Anna Quindlen

Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining-room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household. ~ Julia Margaret Cameron

Far as I knew, closest she'd gotten to art was a drafting table and dressing mannequins in store windows, and the closest I'd gotten to saving the world was my name on some petitions, for everything from recycling aluminum cans to saving the whales. I put my cans in the trash now, and I didn't know how the whales we're doing. ~ Joe R. Lansdale

Teaching creativity to your child isn't like teaching good manners. No one can paint a masterpiece by bowing to another person's precepts about elbows on the table. ~ Gurney Williams

You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms! ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss

Unless you take it with me as my husband." Dex's hand stopped in midair. Very slowly, he lowered it to the table. "I'm sorry. For a moment there, I thought you said husband." Sloane's ~ Charlie Cochet

OLIVER DAVENANT did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. "Don't!" he had once cried to her in loud agony.

In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned an ~ Elizabeth Taylor

The table robbes more then a thiefe. ~ George Herbert

But please eat at the table and use a coaster. ~ Sarra Manning

A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Food matters because it's one of the things that forces us to live in this world
this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world
no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness. ~ Shauna Niequist

But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You're looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues. ~ George H. W. Bush

Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn't. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet. ~ Iain M. Banks

I don't normally get very star struck. However, I was just at a table read for a movie. It was an animated movie where they have all the actors come in and sit around a big table and read the whole script out loud so you can see what's working, what's not working. And this is an animated movie that Paul McCartney is doing and he's producing it. So I got to meet Paul McCartney. ~ Rob Huebel

For example, I keep all my actual writing in the Manuscript section divided by chapter, and then, in the research section, I have folders for Setting, Characters, and Plot with a separate area for my cuts file (where I put big blocks of text that I've cut out of the story but can't bring myself to delete yet) and my writing worksheet, which is the table I use to keep track of my word counts. ~ Rachel Aaron

I reached down and gripped mu wheels, moving away from the table and rolling away without another word. I'd leave on my terms. And he and his ego would be just fine. ~ J. Nathan

And he [Louis Brandeis] talks to his young acolyte, Horace Kallen, who wrote this beautiful book called Cultural Pluralism, and he comes to believe that by being better Jews, or better members of our ethnic group, we can be better Americans, because America is like an orchestra in which identity is defined by the diversity of perspectives that we bring to the table. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it. ~ Teju Cole

The parents are making threatening noises, turning dinner into performance art, with dad doing his Arnold Schwarzenegger imitation and mom playing Glenn Close in one of her psycho roles. I am the Victim.
Mom: [creepy smile] "Thought you could put one over us, did you, Melinda? Big high school students now, don't need to show your homework to your parents, don't need to show any failing test grades?"
Dad: [bangs table, silverware jumps] "Cut the crap. She knows what's up. The interim reports came today. Listen to me, young lady. I'm only going to say this to you once. You get those grades up or your name is mud. Hear me? Get them up!" [Attacks baked potato.] ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Everyone thought that the Spurs would run through us and everyone is talking about the Spurs vs. the Suns in the conference finals. This team has a lot of heart and a lot of pride. ~ Marcus Camby

Unlike every other product that is now manufactured for the table, wine exists in as many varieties as there are people who produce it. Variations in technique, climate, grape, soil and culture ensure that wine is, to the ordinary drinker, the most unpredictable of drinks, and to the connoisseur the most intricately informative, responding to its origins like a game of chess to its opening move. ~ Roger Scruton

You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time. ~ Anthony Marra

Mildred adjusted the papers and scribbled some more. When she was finished, she took off her glasses, leaving them to swing from the chain around her neck. She gave the women around the table a pointed look. "Now think hard, ladies, can you come up with anything else? ~ Kirsten Fullmer