Oireachtas Committees Quotes

cigar. Do you know the average age of the mission controller during the Apollo program?" Now we all shrugged, but he wasn't really asking. "Twenty-seven!" "Your point?" "My point is that these days people barely trust a twenty-seven-year-old to cook their burger, never mind land on the moon. Everything needs to be vetted by a million committees, and we're afraid of practically everything. We're just not willing to accept risk anymore, and it's killing this country. ~ Matthew Mather

All these teachers and [screenwriting] books mean you see movies that have been worked over by more committees wielding more rules, that all originality and authorship is lost. That's why you're seeing superstars like Brad Pitt in THE FIGHT CLUB and Tom Cruise in MAGNOLIA. They're desperately searching for people writing and directing off-formula movies. ~ Paul Schrader

I served on the Armed Services Committee for 18 years and we must lead, or the job won't get done, unfortunately, for our country. ~ John Kasich

I regret my choice of words which do not accurately reflect the process of the James committee, with which I have been closely involved and totally support. ~ Howard Flight

I've come to feel very strongly, not as a joke, that if you appoint a committee of more than four people, their efficiency starts to deteriorate. ~ Charlton Heston

As debate is rare in the House of Representatives, since nearly all real business is done in the committees, it is very natural that such debate as there is should be very oratorical, should be ~ D. W Brogan

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

In 1969 my parents, my sister, my brother Jin-ming, and I were expelled from Chengdu one after another, and sent to distant parts of the Sichuan wilderness. We were among millions of urban dwellers to be exiled to the countryside.

In this way, young people would not be roaming the cities with nothing to do, creating trouble out of sheer boredom, and adults like my parents would have a 'future." They were part of the old administration which had been replaced by Mao's Revolutionary Committees, and packing them off to the sticks to do hard labor was a convenient solution.

According to Mao's rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside 'to be reformed." Mao advocated 'thought reform through labor' for everyone, but never explained the relationship between the two. Of course, no one asked for clarification. Merely to contemplate such a question was tantamount to treason. In reality, everyone in China knew that hard labor, particularly in the countryside, was always punishment. It was noticeable that none of Mao's henchmen, the members of the newly established Revolutionary Committees, army officers and very few of their children had to do it.

The first of us to be expelled was my father. Just after New Year 1969 he was sent to Miyi County in the region of Xichang, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, an area so remote that it is China's satellite launch base today. It lies about 300 miles from Chengdu, four days' journey by truck, as there was no ~ Jung Chang

A modern world, with so many choices for women, yet still very much a man's world, with little

place for compassion or community or flowery skirts. No, it was a world of business suits and

lawsuits, of committees and careful conversations. ~ Debotri Dhar

Not even Sen. [Joseph] McCarthy was able to repress ideas he opposed as effectively as Harvard's hiring committees have suppressed the conservative viewpoints they despise and fear. ~ David Horowitz

EAN codes ordinarily have the first three digits (the prefix) identifying the country of manufacture, but that doesn't make sense for books. The industry committee's clever solution was to invent two new imaginary countries -- called Bookland 1 and Bookland 2 -- with corresponding prefixes of 978 and 979." (29) ~ Bruce T. Batchelor

What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers. ~ John Green

Without bureaus, committees, officials or emissaries to manufacture sentiment in his favor, without intrigue or effort on his part, Grant is the candidate whose supporters have never threatened to bolt. ~ Roscoe Conkling

An optimist is somebody who thinks our various political and social systems, schools and churches, support groups and Boy Scout troops, jury trials and congressional committees, are on the up-and-up. That they are intended for the benefit of the members. The reality is that they are designed to keep everyone in line. ~ Jack McDevitt

Senator, my answer is that the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court requires that nominees before this committee for a position on that court not forecast, give predictions, give hints, about how they might rule in cases that might come before the Supreme Court,. ~ John Roberts

During all these years I have been enabled to trust in the living God alone. In answer to prayer $7,500,000 have been sent to me. We have needed as much as $200,000 in one year, and it has all come when needed. No man can ever say I asked him for a penny. We have no committees, no collectors, no voting, and no endowment. All has come in answer to believing prayer. ~ Charles R. Parsons

In 1975 a Senate committee headed by Frank Church found that the [Central Intelligence] Agency had planned a number of assassination operations, using everything from poison to machine guns and sometimes mob hit men ~ Jim Garrison

India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of their knowledge of parliamentary systems, parliamentary manners. They were big debaters. They [had], as it were, a long apprenticeship in training for being in power. Even when Gandhi made it a mass movement, the idea of elective representatives, elected working committees, elected leadership, all that stayed because basically Indians wanted to impress the British that they were going to be as good as the British were at running a parliamentary democracy. And that helped quite a lot. ~ Meghnad Desai

We always had a central committee. They were mesmerized by Eldridge Cleaver. ~ Huey Newton

The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies. ~ Fay Weldon

These are the daily annoyances, the subtle messages of whiteness. But we bear other scars, too. Over and over I have seen white men and women get praise for their gifts and skills while women of color are told only about their potential for leadership. When white people end up being terrible at their jobs, I have seen supervisors move mountains to give them new positions more suited to their talents, while people of color are told to master their positions or be let go. I have been in the room when promises were made to diversify boardrooms, leadership teams, pastoral staff, faculty and staff positions, only to watch committees appoint a white man in the end. It's difficult to express how these incidents accumulate, making you feel undervalued, underappreciated, and ultimately expendable. ~ Austin Channing Brown

The committee's work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome. This is an effort designed to involve the campus community in a discovery of the meaning of our past. ~ Ruth J. Simmons

We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

It's interesting that at a time when she could have differentiated herself from the ranks of [Democratic National Committee Chairman] Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and the far left ranks of the Democratic Party, she chose to join those on the front ranks of the blame game, It would have been interesting if she had shown some level of restraint. ~ Brian Jones

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. ~ Robert Hughes

Somebody said, 'You may be a committee chair.' I don't think so. I don't think anybody would want me that much. ~ Angus King

A national legal organization is giving very serious thought to using The Betrayal of America as a legal basis for asking the House Judiciary Committee to institute impeachment proceedings against these five justices. ~ Vincent Bugliosi

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. ~ Jacques Rogge

The only good thing ever done by a committee was the King James version. ~ Rita Mae Brown

When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive. ~ Thomas Lennon

His own children were not members of the Clemson incoming freshman class, but two of his nieces and a nephew were. On the news, he outlined his problems with the summer-reading committee's selection. The book talks in graphic terms about pornography, about fetish, about masturbation, about multiple sex partners . . . The book contains a very extensive list of over-the-top sexual and antireligious references. The explicit message that this sends to students is that they are encouraged to find themselves sexually. ~ Ann Patchett

I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares. ~ William Bateson

Even if I'd stayed [in the US to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons'] I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort. ~ Orson Welles

There is not a revolution that succeeded in a few months. It takes years, even decades, to fulfill its goals. I am very hopeful because I trust the revolution and feel nobody can really conquer a nation that has decided to be united and to fight, and we decided to fight. The revolution is there, inside the Egyptians by the millions. ~ Nawal El Saadawi

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. ~ Ken Robinson