Grace Hopper

The most dangerous phrase in the language is, 'We've always done it this way.'

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.

In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn't budge a log, they didn't try to grow a larger ox. We shouldn't be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

I seem to do a lot of retiring.

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.

In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, 'Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me.'... At the end of about a week, I called back and said, 'I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?'

I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, 'What are you?'

Never, never, never take the first no. There are a certain number of people in business, industry, and government who always say no the first time you suggest something new, because they're lazy... But there's another group... who always say no the first time... because they want to see if you believe in it enough to come back and ask again. So never take the first no. Always go back and ask again. As a matter of fact, I take about four no's and then I figure out how to get around the guy, but that technique comes with age.

I noticed he always said no to things the first time. So the next time I went in to suggest something I said 'let's pretend this is the second time I'm presenting this'. I said, 'you always say no the first time'. And he looked at me with the funniest expression. I had him over the barrel from then on because I'd just go and say, 'this is the fourth time I'm requesting this, let's just say yes now'.

If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law!

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's simply larger than it needs to be.

The only phrase I've ever disliked is, 'Why, we've always done it that way.' I always tell young people, 'Go ahead and do it. You can always apologize later.'

No computer is ever going to ask a new, reasonable question. It takes trained people to do that.

We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

I've always objected to doing anything over again if I had already done it once.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.