Elizabeth Warren Quotes

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

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.

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

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

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.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

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

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they're really not listening, or they're listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they're so right that they're not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

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

Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.

I can think of nothing worse than a think-tank where everybody agreed.

Any time people come together in a meeting, we're not necessarily getting the best ideas; we're just getting the ideas of the best talkers.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

When you have more than two people working together, it gets a bit unfocused as an idea.

Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

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

People who work with me say I have a four-step response to new ideas: rejection, reconsideration, acceptance, ownership. I need to listen more patiently.

If liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation, and free speech over offense.