57 Quotes by Hyman Rickover

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.

Half-truths are like half a brick – they can be thrown farther.

When doing a job – any job – one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in that job forever.

I have a son. I love my son. I want everything that I do to be so safe that I would be happy to have my son operating it. That’s my fundamental rule.

Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one’s arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.

It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called “progress” to alter our lives without attempting to control it-as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.

To doubt one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don’t defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don’t be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.

Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.

We bury the men who do the nation’s creative work under layers of administrators and mountains of memoranda. We shrivel creativity by endless frustrations.