Selected planning quotes

1. It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.

2. Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

3. The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.

4. Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

5. In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

6. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

7. Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

8. Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

9. If I see an ending, I can work backward.

10. Better start rushing before the rush begins!

11. It's hard to face tomorrow, but it's easier than facing no tomorrow.

12. One thing you can rely on is that there will always be uncertainty.

13. Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

14. I think that's what I love about my life. There's no maniacal master plan. It's just unfolding before me.

15. It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

16. I'm a terrible long-term planner.

17. Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

18. You can never plan the future by the past.

19. Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

20. Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation.

21. The future... seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.

22. We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

23. Raeder, the political admiral, stealthily built up the German Navy in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, and then put it to use in a series of aggressions which he had taken a leading part in planning.

24. The art of concentrating strength at one point, forcing a breakthrough, rolling up and securing the flanks on either side, and then penetrating like lightning deep into his rear, before the enemy has time to react.

25. Don't order one for the road, because the road is already laid out.

26. Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

27. In one point the plan was fatally defective, since it involved the deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but ill understood,--the fiercest, boldest, most politic, and most ambitious savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth.

28. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

29. To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

30. Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

31. The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

32. The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

33. Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.

34. The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.

35. We have some control over when we retire. However, we have very little control over how long we will live.

36. Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

37. Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

38. About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

39. First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can.

40. Change before you have to.

41. I suppose, to use our national motto, something will turn up.

42. He was fresh and full of faith that 'something would turn up.'

43. The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.

44. I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

45. Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, 'I don't know how to spell that.' I said, 'Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay.' But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.

46. We will never make a 32-bit operating system.

47. Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man's consciously attempting to bring them about. Man is very vain; he likes to feel that he is responsible for all the favorable things that happen, and he is innocent of all the unfavorable happenings. But all the larger evolutionary patternings seeming favorable or unfavorable to man's conditioned reflexing are transpiring transcendentally to any of man's conscious planning or contriving.

48. Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that 'this present' might be 'the world's last night'; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.

49. 'By the Lion's Mane, a strange device,' said King Peter, 'to set a lantern here where the trees cluster so thick about it and so high above it that if it were lit it should give light to no man!' (ch. 17)

50. A rule of thumb for a warrior is that he makes his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less drain his power.

51. A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. Once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him; no one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgment. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions.

52. The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.

53. There are three ways that men get what they want; by planning, by working, and by praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning, or thinking. Then you must have well-trained troops to carry it out: that's working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks; I call it God. God has His part, or margin in everything, That's where prayer comes in.

54. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

55. A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

56. Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

57. The best way to suppose what may come, is to remember what is past.

58. Security... it's simply the recognition that changes will take place and the knowledge that you're willing to deal with whatever happens.

59. Our cities must not be abandoned. They're worth fighting for, not just by those who live in them, but by industry, commerce, unions, everyone. What we need is a neighborhood where people can walk to work, raise their kids, enjoy life. That simple.

60. I'm not good at future planning. I don't plan at all. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a day planner and I don't have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.

61. If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

62. There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

63. Bob Hope: Let's not do any jokes we didn't plan on, eh.

64. This is an issue couples have to be straight on and agree on before they walk down that aisle; otherwise there is no way their marriage will survive.

65. Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

66. Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

67. The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

68. The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

69. Never tell your resolution beforehand.

70. Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry.

71. The general holds back his cavalry to a pace that suits his infantry, for if its infantry is left behind, the cavalry will be surrounded by the enemy.

72. I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

73. 'A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.' (p. 163)

74. But I wanted marriage for myself. I was not calculating about it. I wish I was more calculating.

75. He is a terrible planner, though. So am I.

76. We might plan a trip to London. Then it is a sunny day and we want to stay at home.

77. Do nothing till thou hast well considered the end of it.

78. No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

79. The composer makes plans, music laughs.

80. An army marches on its stomach.

81. I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.

82. If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius where reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation.

83. Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never.

84. We must take things as we find them, and not as we wish them to be.

85. A goal is a dream with a deadline.

86. First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

87. Perseverance: The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those that fail.

88. The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

89. You can see the future best through peripheral vision.

90. People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.

91. Be realistic: Plan for a miracle.

92. She's all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity.

93. Si se sabe exactamente lo que se va a hacer, ?para que hacerlo?.

94. What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.

95. Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.'

96. When I came to the states in the mid 1960s - 1964, 1964 - I didn't think I'd be here maybe a couple years, going to have a great experience in the United States and then go back to Canada. Well, here we are 40 years later.

97. Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

98. It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

99. Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

100. The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.