© 2008 MAS Solutions LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Quality Quotes - Part 1
President, MAS Solutions LLC.Over the past few years, I've been assembling a collection of quotes related to quality and productivity improvement. These quotes are attributed to a variety of individuals, spanning many eras, with some even going back as far as the Roman Empire prior to 180 AD.
Each of these quotes share one thing in common, as they each address some aspect of quality, and its importance to society at that time. As you read through these, I think that each of you may find something here that has its own personal relevance to the work you're performing on a daily basis.
I'm starting out with only a partial selection of quotes, but I will provide more in future articles.
"Everything can be improved."
- C. W. Barron
"It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn't."
- Martin Van Buren
"Quality begins on the inside... and then works its way out."
- Bob Moawad
"Quality is everyone's responsibility."
- W. Edwards Deming
"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives."
- William A. Foster
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
- Peter F. Drucker
“Forget not on every occasion to ask thyself, is this not one of the unnecessary things?”
- Marcus Aurelius
“If you’re doing something the same way you have been doing it for ten years, the chances are you are doing it wrong.”
- Charles F. Kettering
“It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way.”
- Henry F. Harrower
"It isn’t so much how busy you are - but why you are busy. The bee is praised. The mosquito is swatted.”
- Roger Devlin
“Never confuse motion with action”
- Ernest Hemingway
“Do not tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.”
- James J. Ling
“Two men cut wood all day long. One worked straight through, without stopping to rest. At the end of the day he had a sizable pile of logs. The other would chop for 50 minutes and then take a ten-minute break. At the end of the day he had a much larger pile. ‘How could you chop more?’ asked the man who’d worked continuously. His friend replied, ‘When I stopped for rest, I also sharpened my ax.’”
- Unknown
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion (and) the thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent.”
- C. Northcote Parkinson
“There can be no economy where there is no efficiency.”
- Benjamin Disraeli
“For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
- William Laird Levitt
“Innovation is a gamble, but so is standing pat.”
- Arthur B. Dougall
“Innovation is more likely to come from subordinates when the boss expects it.”
- Unknown
“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.”
- Francis Bacon
“You seldom improve quality by cutting costs, but you can often cut costs by improving quality.”
- Karl Albrecht
“…every successful quality revolution has included the participation of upper management. We know of no exceptions.”
- Joseph Juran
"If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got".
- High-tech proverb
"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything the can be counted counts."
- Sign hanging in Albert Einstein's office at Princeton
“One trouble with Americans is that we’re fixers rather than preventers.”
- James Harold Doolittle
“Better is the enemy of good.”
- Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
“You can make me sell them cheaper. You can’t make me reduce the quality.”
- Frank Perdue
“Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things."
- Bill Reddin [paraphrased]
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