Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Moore Colby

Colby skewers the committee as a moral laundering machine: a place where bad ideas don’t die, they get minutes taken. The line is engineered like a trapdoor. It begins with “We always,” a sweeping, familiar confession that implicates everyone in the room, then tightens the blade with “any one of us alone,” insisting the problem isn’t ignorance but conscience. Alone, a person might feel the drag of common sense, the embarrassment of insisting. Together, that friction disappears.

The real target isn’t collaboration; it’s diffusion. “By committee” signals procedure masquerading as prudence, a ritual that turns persistence into a virtue regardless of what’s being persisted in. The subtext is about responsibility: when authorship is shared, accountability gets diluted. No one has to own the stubbornness, so stubbornness becomes easier to sustain. The committee doesn’t just make decisions; it manufactures permission.

As an educator, Colby would have watched institutional life up close: school boards, faculty committees, curriculum panels. These are spaces designed to be reasonable, to temper ego and bias. His cynicism lands because it flips that promise. The committee becomes the engine of the very irrationality it’s meant to prevent, not through malice but through social dynamics: politeness, face-saving, fear of being the lone dissenter, the quiet reward of consensus.

The wit is in “too reasonable to persist,” as if reasonableness is a private instinct we suppress when we can outsource it. Colby’s punchline is bureaucratic anthropology: collective decision-making as a way to keep going after the solo self would have had the decency to stop.