Norman Lamm Quotes

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

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.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

If you really wish to be independent and make your own judgements about everything important, it is difficult to be a good team player —because a team has different criteria for making judgements about an issue.

As you get larger, it is harder to have focused discussions. Because one of the things I've learned about Congress over the past four years that I've been in is there's no shortage of opinions about how things should be done on any particular subject.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

I listen with attention to the judgment of all men; but so far as I can remember, I have followed none but my own..

Deliberation is the work of many men. Action of one alone.

Where all think alike, none thinks very much.

It's probably the journalist in me, but I'm naturally suspicious about consensus and always feel an impulse to confront it.

I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that's a key character trait in me.

Sisterhood is a powerful metaphor; it ought not become a synonym for groupthink.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

When everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks.

How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

Working in lock-step simply isn't a good idea. Never has been, never will be.

I hope that the message I conveyed in 'Julie of the Wolves' is to tell young people to think things out. Think independently.

The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.

We try to make sensible decisions with the facts in front of us. The problem with sensible decisions is that so is everyone else.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.