Quotes About Quality

I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that notion — far from it: my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended.

Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy...neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?

The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution: and we are part of it. The static, the enemy of change, is the enemy of life, and therefore our implacable enemy.

The price is high for not defining requirements or not doing it well. Poorly defined requirements result in requirements defects—errors in requirements caused by incorrect, incomplete, missing, or conflicting requirements. Defective requirements may result in: • Cost overruns, • Expensive rework, • Poor quality, • Late delivery, • Dissatisfied customers, and • Exhausted and demoralized team members.

An awareness of alternatives at the early stages of learning a skill gives a conditional quality to the learning, which, again, increases mindfulness.

If enough dishonest merchants water their milk, more and more customers will forget what normal milk tastes like and buy only the cheaper - watered down - variety.

Craftsmanship cements a relationship of trust between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not.

In the early days of outlets, manufacturers ripped labels from items because they were reluctant to link their brand with the cut-rate price. But today many discounters do just the opposite, trumpeting goods under brand names to give the impression of quality while not necessarily backing that claim in a meaningful way.

Quality … has to do with intention.

I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.

We do need to realize, though, that it is the quality of our love that determines the quality of this life.

Man, before he is being regenerated, does not even know that any internal man exists, much less is he acquainted with its nature and quality.

I've always done food that can work in a set time frame. The message I'm trying to get across is, it doesn't have to take three days to do this. With planning, you can do a lot and really have quality food every day.

Les romantiques furent les derniers spécialistes du suicide. Depuis, on le bâcle... Pour en améliorer la qualité, nous avons grand besoin d'un nouveau mal du siècle.

I don't have an interest in any car that isn't good for the environment, other than maybe an aesthetic quality in a picture book.

It just proves good movies don't need 100 million dollars to be good.

If there's one quality I hate in a woman, it's modesty. Besides making me, with my trombone mouth, feel vaguely uncouth, I think it's a chickenshit response to the demands of the marketplace, or the universe, not that I can tell them apart.

In many matters of business, perhaps in most, a continuity of mediocrity is better than a hotch-potch of excellences.

Not only does a bureaucracy thus tend to under-government, in point of quality; it tends to over-government, in point of quantity.