Friday, February 22, 2008
Cruel comments for the cynically-minded
I love collecting quotes – especially really cynical comments! Here are a few that might provoke a rueful smile for those involved in proposal development:
“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas. (Was he writing about some procurement teams?)
“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” - Abraham Lincoln. (He’d obviously just read the draft text from a subject matter expert!)
“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” – John Bright. (No, surely not a comment on some account managers!)
“He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Samuel Johnson. (Yep, I’ve worked on proposals with more than a few folks who’d fit that bill).
“He had delusions of adequacy.” – Walter Kerr. (Where do we even start?)
And my personal recent favourite?
“If all the experts tell you to go right, and you decide to go left, you’re probably stupid. But if you get lucky, and discover a pot of gold along the stupid path, people will call you a leader. You’ll still be stupid, but fewer people will feel the need to point that out.” - Scott Adams
Jon - it may not have been his intention but Oscar Wilde summed up the life of a proposal writer when he said:
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
Although from personal experience I find it all the more exasperating when I need to put back commas that others have taken out!
Wilde also had a view on our transatlantic cousins:
“America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”
Any comment BJ?
Hi, Alan. If you find a way to hush BJ up, can you let me know? :-)
Coincidentally, this afternon the BBC news website has published its list of the top comedy put-downs ever. My favourite comes from Red Dwarf, and ties in to the “hushing up” theme:
“Look, we all have something to bring to this discussion. But I think from now on the thing you should bring is silence.”
Anyone ever felt like saying that to a proposal team member?!
I’m speechless.
Just kidding, of course.
I think it was proposals Groucho Marx was referring to when he said, “From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
As to discoveries of America prior to Columbus and those being hushed up, I suspect it probably was more a case of sheer awe of the place by the good folks from the other side of the pond*
*Of which all of my grandparents were members (Scottish and England) by the way.