Without standards, there can be no improvement.

Progress cannot be generated when we are satisfied with existing situations.

The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people's creativity. People don't go to Toyota to 'work' they go there to 'think'.

Having no problems is the biggest problem of all.

Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves.

We are doomed to failure without a daily destruction of our various preconceptions.

The more inventory a company has, the less likely they will have what they need.

Data is of course important in manufacturing, but I place the greatest emphasis on facts.

Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced.

Where there is no Standard there can be no Kaizen

When you are out observing on the gemba, do something to help them. If you do, people will come to expect that you can help them and will look forward to seeing you again on the gemba.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.

According to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don't know if this is what the IDF says to the media.

Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional. I didn't want to reach 40 and have to say all I'd done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.

To find out what happens to a system when you interfere with it you have to interfere with it (not just passively observe it).

Priests are no more necessary to religion than politicians are to patriotism.

Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

For too long, the victims of crime have been the forgotten persons of our criminal justice system.

Even now I wonder what I might have accomplished if I'd studied harder

Never miss a party if you can make it!