The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as a chimpanzee’s and one-tenth as long as a human’s – but four times as long as the official’s who created it.

If you can afford to advertise, you don’t need to.

Hardware works best when it matters the least.

Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.

If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done. If the Earth could be made to rotate twenty times as fast, everyone else would get twice...

One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.

One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.

There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.

In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year,...

The process of competitively selecting contractors to perform work is based on a system of rewards and penalties, all distributed randomly.

If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice.

If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.

One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output.

Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.

It’s easy to get a loan unless you need it.

Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread.

It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished.

The best way to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money.

Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters.

A billion saved is a billion earned.

Bulls do not win bull fights. People do.

Simply stated, it is sagacious to eschew obfuscation.

In my view the organization has been far more successful than I dreamed it would be. But my view is also that it’s still an unproved experiment.

Most projects start out slowly – and then sort of taper off.

By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

The weaker the data available upon which to base one’s conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

Aircraft flight in the 21st century will always be in a westerly direction, preferably supersonic, crossing time zones to provide the additional hours needed to fix the broken electronics.

The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is ”The computer is down”

A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.

People working in the private sector should try to save money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again.

All too many consultants, when asked, ‘What is 2 and 2?’ respond, ‘What do you have in mind?’

There are many highly successful businesses in the United States. There are also many highly paid executives. The policy is not to intermingle the two.

The most unsuccessful four years in the education of a cost-estimator is fifth grade arithmetic.

Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated.

Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the lack of rank.

Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.

Although most products will soon be too costly to purchase, there will be a thriving market in the sale of books on how to fix them.

If sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.