“As a manager you're paid to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, it's a sure sign you're doing things wrong.”

“All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.”

“Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?"”

“An employer has no business with a man's personality... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.”

“Most innovators are successful to the extent to which they define risks and confine them.”

“The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.”

“The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril...It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.”

“Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.”