Quotes by Norman Augustine

• 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.
• Motivation will almost always beat mere talent.
• One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.
• One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'
• One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.
• People do not win people fights. Lawyers do.
• People working in the private sector should try to save money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again.
• Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the lack of rank.
• Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.
• It's easy to get a loan unless you need it.
• Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.
• If today was half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.
• The early bird gets the worm.The early worm... gets eaten.
• The more one produces, the less one gets.
• The optimum committee has no members.
• 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.
• 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.
• There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.
• Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.
• By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.
• 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.
• A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better.
• A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.
• All too many consultants, when asked, 'What is 2 and 2?' respond, 'What do you have in mind?'
• 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.
• Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated.
• If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.
• By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers.
• Most projects start out slowly - and then sort of taper off.
• Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.
• Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread.
• Hardware works best when it matters the least.
• If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.
• If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice.
• 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 as much done since all the managers would fly off.
• If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.
• It costs a lot to build bad products.
• Bulls do not win bull fights. People do.
• 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.