Top 200 W. Edwards Deming Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You have to manage a system. The system doesn’t manage itself.”

— W. Edwards Deming

102. “Innovation comes from the producer – not from the customer.”

— W. Edwards Deming

103. “Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.”

— W. Edwards Deming

104. “Quality is made in the board room. A worker can deliver lower quality, but she cannot deliver quality better than the system allow.”

— W. Edwards Deming

105. “Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.”

— W. Edwards Deming

106. “If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left.”

— W. Edwards Deming

107. “Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.”

— W. Edwards Deming

108. “The process is not just the sum of its parts.”

— W. Edwards Deming

109. “All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.”

— W. Edwards Deming

110. “A rational prediction has an explanation based on theory.”

— W. Edwards Deming

111. “We must satisfy our customers.”

— W. Edwards Deming

112. “When asked what single event was most helpful in developing the Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein replied, “Figuring out how to think about the problem”.”

— W. Edwards Deming

113. “Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.”

— W. Edwards Deming

114. “There is no knowledge without theory.”

— W. Edwards Deming

115. “Forces of Destruction: grades in school, merit system, incentive pay, business plans, quotas.”

— W. Edwards Deming

116. “Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, of the machine-time, of all which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay.”

— W. Edwards Deming

117. “You should not ask questions without knowledge.”

— W. Edwards Deming

118. “Hard work and best efforts will not by themselves dig us out of the pit.”

— W. Edwards Deming

119. “You can see from a flow diagram who depends on you and whom you can depend on. You can now take joy in your work.”

— W. Edwards Deming

120. “No one can measure the loss of business that may arise from a defective item that goes out to a customer.”

— W. Edwards Deming

121. “To copy is to invite disaster.”

— W. Edwards Deming

122. “Management’s job is to know which systems are stable and which are not.”

— W. Edwards Deming

123. “We want best efforts guided by theory.”

— W. Edwards Deming

124. “The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.”

— W. Edwards Deming

125. “The most valuable “currency” of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader’s highest priority.”

— W. Edwards Deming

126. “You can not plan to make a discovery. You do not plan innovation.”

— W. Edwards Deming

127. “Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems.”

— W. Edwards Deming

128. “We know what we told him, but we don’t know what he heard.”

— W. Edwards Deming

129. “There is no economy in having one operation produce a part and another separate the good ones from the bad ones.”

— W. Edwards Deming

130. “A man who knows not his limitations is of no use to anyone.”

— W. Edwards Deming

131. “The most basic problem is that performance appraisals often don’t accurately assess performance.”

— W. Edwards Deming

132. “Research shows that the climate of an organization influences an individuals contribution far more than the individual himself.”

— W. Edwards Deming

133. “A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. This is not ranking people. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management.”

— W. Edwards Deming

134. “Eighty percent of American managers cannot answer with any measure of confidence these seemingly simple questions: What is my job? What in it really counts? How well am I doing?”

— W. Edwards Deming

135. “Any manager can do well in an expanding market.”

— W. Edwards Deming

136. “When a worker has reached a stable state, further training will not help him.”

— W. Edwards Deming

137. “The moral is that it is necssary to innovate, to predict the needs of the customers, and give him more. He that innovates and is lucky will take the market.”

— W. Edwards Deming

138. “Shrink, shrink variation, to reduce the loss.”

— W. Edwards Deming

139. “I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this: 94% belongs to the system responsibility of management 6% special.”

— W. Edwards Deming

140. “Managers don’t like giving appraisals, and employees don’t like getting them. Perhaps they’re not liked because both parties suspect what the evidence has proved for decades: Traditional performance appraisals don’t work.”

— W. Edwards Deming

141. “The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.”

— W. Edwards Deming

142. “Zero defects is a super highway going down the tube.”

— W. Edwards Deming

143. “One need not be eminent in any part of profound knowledge in order to understand it and to apply it. The various segments of the system of profound knowledge cannot be separated. They interact with each other. For example knowledge about psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.”

— W. Edwards Deming

144. “A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.”

— W. Edwards Deming

145. “It is a mistake to assume that if everybody does his job, it will be all right. The whole system may be in trouble.”

— W. Edwards Deming

146. “To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge, knowledge for leadership of transformation.”

— W. Edwards Deming

147. “The emphasis should be on why we do a job.”

— W. Edwards Deming

148. “People generally want to do the right thing, but in a large organization, they frequently don’t really understand what is the right thing.”

— W. Edwards Deming

149. “You can not achieve an aim unless you have a method.”

— W. Edwards Deming

150. “Mere allocation of huge sums of money for quality will not bring quality.”

— W. Edwards Deming