We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing.

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.

I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, Mother, what was war?

influence flows across networks up to three degrees away. What your friends’ friends eat or do or think will influence what you eat or do or think—but further connections will not.

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant.

How quickly a person in pain whom you can't help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. Its like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

But I learned that there's a certain character that can be built from embarrassing yourself endlessly. If you can sit happy with embarrassment, there's not much else that can really get to ya.

Patience is a noble virtue, and, when rightly exercised, does not fail of its reward.

Men want to put their signature at the bottom; women don't want to finish that letter.

Every time I was cast in a role, the director put a gun in my hand, so I figured I’d better learn how to use one. Then I found out I really liked it.

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.