Quotes from Hyman Rickover

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience.

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courage and patience.

Trying to make things work in government is sometimes like trying to sew a button on a custard pie.

Free discussion requires an atmosphere unembarrassed by any suggestion of authority or even respect.

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect for human dignity for all classes of our society.

Half-truths are like half a brick - they can be thrown farther.

If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy; God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

I have a son. I love my son. I want everything that I do to be so safe that I would be happy to have my son operating it. That's my fundamental rule.

How the hell are you supposed to know what God wants you to do with your life, eh?

All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom.

When the men in Russia foul up, they are dismisses, sometimes losing their necks. But we protect those who fail and press them to the government bosom.

A system under which it takes three men to check what one is doing is not control; it is systematic strangulation.

It is a human inclination to hope things will work out, despite evidence or doubt to the contrary. A successful manager must resist this temptation.

We bury the men who do the nation's creative work under layers of administrators and mountains of memoranda. We shrivel creativity by endless frustrations.

Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an "officer of the court" and keep the general interest always in mind.

A free society can survive only with men and women of integrity. Mediocrity can destroy us just as surely as perils far more famous. In a society that is willing to accept mediocrity, the opportunity for failure is boundless.

Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to heaven if you die dumb. Become better informed. Lean from others' mistakes. You could not live long enough to make them all yourself.

A child is being properly educated only when he is learning to become independent of his parents.

Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done