Eighty percent of American managers cannot answer with any measure of confidence these seemingly simple questions: What is my job? What in it really counts? How well am I doing?

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

Put a good person in a bad system and the bad system wins, no contest.

Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.

Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.

The greatest waste … is failure to use the abilities of people…to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make.

In God we trust; all others bring data.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

Management by results - like driving a car by looking in rear view mirror.

Stamping out fires is a lot of fun, but it is only putting things back the way they were.

Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.

Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.

I didn’t like his tone. In fact I didn’t like boys’ tone when they knew they were hot and tried to be rude to girls because they knew they were hot.

I would warn any minority student today against the temptations of self-segregation: take support and comfort from your own group as you can, but don’t hide within it.

Time is change transformation evolution.

I used to say that I wanted to make great art with people I love. Now I have an addendum to that goal: to get things on the air.

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

When you sacrifice, you force others to sacrifice. It's an extremely powerful weapon.

I don't want to be doing fashion shoots and being interviewed about where I shop. Who cares?

I've been acting since I was 10. At age 14, 15 and 16 it's difficult to find roles and to find yourself even and when everyone's eyes are on you, it's difficult.

I don't know if, at the end of the day, how brave Saddam Hussein would be if he were stripped of his bodyguards and everything else.