Grace Hopper — "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
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More from Grace Hopper
"I don't think I'm a genius. I just work hard."
"The greatest danger is not in failure, but in succeeding too easily."
"You can't just teach people to do things. You have to teach them to think."
"They told me computers could only do arithmetic."
"If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but... to build systems of comp…"
Details
Encouraging action and innovation, especially when dealing with bureaucracy.
Date: 1986 (U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine, July)
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Acting first rather than waiting for bureaucratic approval is the practical path forward. Gatekeepers slow you down or block you entirely when permission is required. But if you move and something goes wrong, people are far more willing to accept a brief apology than they would have been to grant upfront authorization. Bias toward action beats process paralysis every time.
Relevance to Grace Hopper
Hopper embodied this throughout her career. As a Navy admiral and computer scientist, she invented the first compiler in the early 1950s — a concept her superiors called impossible — without waiting for sanction. She also championed COBOL against institutional resistance. Repeatedly acting before authorization and justifying afterward was how she pushed computing forward past entrenched military and corporate bureaucracy.
The era
Hopper worked in the mid-20th century, when computing was emerging from academic and military labs into broader use. The U.S. Navy, her primary institution, ran on rigid hierarchies and slow approval chains. Women in technical fields faced additional gatekeeping requiring constant justification. The postwar decades demanded rapid technological advance, making bureaucratic inertia a genuine drag on progress that Hopper had to repeatedly outmaneuver.
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