“We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 11, “Boardrooms and Brokers” (p. 204)
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Charles Stross 211
British science fiction writer and blogger 1964Related quotes

Interview "Milton Friedman Responds" in Chemtech (February 1974) p. 72.

Inaugural address (March 4, 1841)

Source: Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 3 : On classical ground : Histories of style

Essay Do We Survive Death? (1936)
1930s
Context: It is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens. Consider the long history of the activities inspired by moral fervour: human sacrifices, persecutions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms leading up to wholesale extermination by poison gases … Are these abominations, and the ethical doctrines by which they are prompted, really evidence of an intelligent Creator? And can we really wish that the men who practised them should live for ever? The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.
Source: Computer-Aided Design: A Statement of Objectives (1960), p. 2.

p, 125
Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens... (1811)