Top 30 Phil Crosby Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time.”

— Phil Crosby

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Work, Friday Quotes for Work, Excellence Quotes, Work Ethic Quotes, Efficiency Quotes

2. “Quality is free. It’s not a gift, but it’s free. The ‘unquality’ things are what cost money.”

— Phil Crosby

3. “The cost of quality is the expense of doing things wrong.”

— Phil Crosby

4. “When you’re out of quality, you’re out of business.”

— Phil Crosby

5. “Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.”

— Phil Crosby

6. “Quality has to be caused, not controlled.”

— Phil Crosby

7. “If we deliver on time, but the product has defects, we have not delivered on time.”

— Phil Crosby

8. “Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.”

— Phil Crosby

9. “Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.”

— Phil Crosby

10. “In a true zero-defects approach, there are no unimportant items.”

— Phil Crosby

11. “If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.”

— Phil Crosby

12. “When in doubt, delete it.”

— Phil Crosby

13. “Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not.”

— Phil Crosby

14. “It isn’t what you find, it’s what you do about what you find.”

— Phil Crosby

15. “Selecting the right person for the right job is the largest part of coaching.”

— Phil Crosby

16. “Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.”

— Phil Crosby

17. “Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.”

— Phil Crosby

18. “Being convinced one knows the whole story is the surest way to fail.”

— Phil Crosby

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

19. “Problems breed problems, and the lack of a disciplined method of openly attacking them breeds more problems.”

— Phil Crosby

20. “Quality is such an attractive banner that sometimes we think we can get away with just waving it, without doing the hard work necessary to achieve it.”

— Phil Crosby

21. “You don’t have to be noisy to be effective.”

— Phil Crosby

22. “A rule to live by: I won’t use anything I can’t explain in five minutes.”

— Phil Crosby

23. “If you don’t know what the defect level is, how do you know when to get mad?”

— Phil Crosby

24. “Most things don’t work like they are supposed to work.”

— Phil Crosby

25. “We must define quality as conformance to specifications if we are to manage it.”

— Phil Crosby

26. “The customer deserves to receive exactly what we have promised to produce – a clean room, a hot cup of coffee, a nonporous casing, a trip to the moon on goassamer wings.”

— Phil Crosby

27. “Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically.”

— Phil Crosby

28. “You are going to be measured anyway by some means, fair or foul. Usually the one doing the measuring has nothing specific in mind; so he does it by the seat of his pants. Careers are destroyed in this manner.”

— Phil Crosby

29. “Many managers feel, somewhat cynically, that people are being paid to do their jobs and that’s that. This attitude reflects an insensitivity to people that is a trademark of many hockey-style managers.”

— Phil Crosby

30. “The great discoveries are usually obvious.”

— Phil Crosby

31. “Successful people breed success.”

— Phil Crosby

32. “It is not possible to know what you need to learn.”

— Phil Crosby