Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur J. Goldberg

Goldberg’s jab lands because it flatters risk while skewering process, a neat bit of mid-century American impatience dressed up as common sense. Columbus becomes a stand-in for every bold executive fantasy: the lone visionary strangled by meetings, memos, and cautious “stakeholder input.” The punchline is the dock, a place of stasis and safety that suddenly reads as a national vice.

The intent is less about Columbus-the-historic figure than Columbus-the-myth: discovery as a clean, heroic act rather than an imperial project with catastrophic consequences. Goldberg, a judge and former labor secretary, knew bureaucracy from the inside; his point isn’t that advice is useless, but that committees can turn responsibility into diffusion. An “advisory committee” is also a legal-sounding shield: if everyone opines, no one owns the outcome. He’s calling out the institutional habit of replacing decisions with deliberation.

Context matters: Goldberg’s career sits in the thick of postwar America’s faith in managerial expertise and its growing suspicion of it. By the time large organizations and government agencies became synonymous with slow-moving caution, “committee” was already a punchline. The line taps that cultural groove: the fear that proceduralism can become a moral alibi for doing nothing.

It works because it’s provocative and incomplete. It dares you to cheer for daring while quietly asking what we lose when we romanticize unaccountable action. Columbus didn’t need fewer advisors; he needed different ones.