A Quote by C. Northcote Parkinson

A committee grows organically, flourishes and blossoms, sunlit on top and shady beneath, until it dies, scattering the seeds from which other committees will spring.

C. Northcote Parkinson

Quote Topics

Beneath Blossoms Committee Committees Dies Grows Organically Other Seeds Shady Spring Top Until Which Will

Quote Author

C. Northcote Parkinson
British - Historian
July 30, 1909 - March 9, 1993

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.

C. Northcote Parkinson

Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death.

Saul Alinsky

Pulling weeds and planting seeds. That's the story of life. We are individual lots on which either weeds of selfishness or fruit of the Holy Spirit grows and flourishes.

Dennis Rainey

I would rather deal with a tyrant any day than a committee. Committees, as a general rule, aren’t willing to take chances, which is why you have a committee in the first place — so you can share the blame.

Hal Riney

Like the seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.

Khalil Gibran

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

P. J. O'Rourke

Generations of men are like the leaves. In winter, winds blow them down to earth, but then, when spring season comes again, the budding wood grows more. And so with men: one generation grows, another dies away.

Homer

He who lives only unto himself withers and dies, while he who forgets himself in the service of others grows and blossoms.

Gordon B. Hinckley

By cool Siloam's shady rill How sweet the lily grows! How sweet the breath beneath the hill Of Sharon's dewy rose!

Richard Heber

There is continual spring, and harvest there Continual, both meeting at one time: For both the boughs do laughing blossoms bear, And with fresh colours deck the wanton prime, And eke attonce the heavy trees they climb, Which seem to labour under their fruits load: The whiles the joyous birds make their pastime Amongst the shady leaves, their sweet above, And their true loves without suspicion tell abroad.

Edmund Spenser

It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, life fruit in the thick of a wood; but where people are planted sparely it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or an espalier. It flourishes where the inn and lodging-house cannot exist.

Hugh Miller

Some people fall head over heels. Other people begin to fall without even knowing it—love grows like a spring flower beneath last autumn’s leaves and catches them by surprise.

Elizabeth Chandler

We have almost a city has probably two or three hundred committees. Every committee is dealing with just one problem and has nothing to do with the other problems.

Alvar Aalto

In the 114th Congress, I had the privilege of serving on two of the most important Committees in the House of Representatives: the House Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.