A. W. F. Edwards Quotes

True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will

3% of the problems have figures, 97% of the problems do not.

A leader must have knowledge. A leader must be able to teach.

Have a time and place for everything, and do everything in its time and place, and you will not only accomplish more, but have far more leisure than those who are always hurrying.

Quality is made in the board room. A worker can deliver lower quality, but she cannot deliver quality better than the system allow.

You must have a supplier relationship of constant improvement.

The process is not just the sum of its parts.

Meeting specifications is not enough.

We have a middle class that lives on a razor blade. So sometimes when you say poverty, you neglect a large portion of the population.

Life is this great big blackboard, and on it you write all the things that you do.

A leader is a coach, not a judge.

Without questions, there is no learning.

There is nothing so elastic as the human mind. The more we are obliged to do, the more we are able to accomplish.

When a worker has reached a stable state, further training will not help him.

Nature hath nothing made so base, but can read some instruction to the wisest man.

There's so few people in this town with a conscience.

I don’t want to talk about loving God. I want to actually love God.

To rule one's anger is well; to prevent it is still better.

It has been aptly said that all Egypt is but the facade of an immense sepulcher.

Yesterdays depth is feeling very shallow, I wanna go deeper, deeper still.

To optimize the whole, we must sub-optimize the parts

Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information.

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.

There is nothing in the animal world, to my mind, more delightful than grown cats at play. They are so swift and light and graceful, so subtle and designing, and yet so richly comic.

Absence of defects does not necessarily build business... Something more is required.

Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to a problem or new modes of expression; thus it brings into existence something new to the individual and to the culture.

Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another - too often ending in the loss of both.

Whoever in prayer can say, 'Our Father', acknowledges and should feel the brotherhood of the whole race of mankind.

Edwards said the greatest moment of his career was winning the national championship. The lowest moment (of my career) happens every time we lose to Utah.

The material universe exists only in the mind.

Leave me if you must, but be faithful to me if you are with me.

A rational prediction has an explanation based on theory.

The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain - stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment - over the long term.

If we have to go through a mental exercise, yes or no, every time we are faced with a tough decision, we will continue to have trouble with living what we supposedly believe.

When we cooperate, everybody wins.

The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.

We are here to learn, to make a difference and to have fun.

Management's job is to optimize the whole system.

I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy.

Management by results is confusing special causes with common causes.

When people try to do what they can not do, they wish to give up.

The transformation will come from leadership.

Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world, as I possibly can.

You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information.

The world is terribly apt to take people at their own valuation.

I think that we're foolhardy to not be engaging in federal funding of stem-cell research in the most aggressive way we possibly can.

People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing.

We must satisfy our customers.

She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.