Quality quotes

Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.
Philip Crosby Let's Talk Quality, 1989

"Quality" as used in quality control and quality assurance has always meant goodness because people were permitted to make value judgements every day. "Goodness" was really what it was all about. However, when the thought of conformance and nonconformance begins to permeate the operation, "goodness" suddenly becomes inadequate.
Philip Crosby Let's Talk Quality, 1989

Not having a common understanding of quality puts more pain into an organization than anything else I have ever known.
Philip Crosby Let's Talk Quality, 1989

If we deliver on time, but the product has defects, we have not delivered on time.
Philip Crosby Let's Talk Quality, 1989

In a true zero-defects approach there are no unimportant items.
Philip Crosby Let's Talk Quality, 1989

The Four Absolutes of Quality Management:

Philip Crosby Quality Without Tears: The Art of Hassle-Free Management, 1984

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.
Miles Maguire "Fine-Tuning Quality Tools" in the Up Front column Quality Progress magazine, October 2000

It costs a lot to build bad products.
Norman Augustine "Augustine's 12th Law" Augustine's Laws, 1986

"Quality is not something you install like a new carpet or a set of bookshelves," he would say. "You implant it. Quality is something you work at. It is a learning process."
From an obituary on Dr W Edwards Deming that appeared in the 21 December 1993 edition of the Washington Post. W Edwards Deming Dies; His Lecture on Quality Control Fueled Japan's Rise by Claudia Levy, Washington Post Staff Writer

The ideal of independence requires resistance to the herd spirit now so widespread,
to our worship of quantity and indifference to quality, to our unthinking devotion to organization, standardization, propaganda, and advertising.
Daniel Gregory Mason Artistic Ideals, 1927

It is quality rather than quantity that counts.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (8 BC - AD 65) Epistles

We have learned that productivity is a social if not a moral principle,
and not just a business priciple; that increased productivity must contribute to a greater income for the masses, to greater job security of the workers, to greater satisfaction for the customer...and that it is not enough for it to contribute to profits.
Peter F Drucker, in Arthur Goodfriend, What is America? The New York Public Library Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations. The Stonesong Press, Inc., 1992

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.
 Peter Drucker Speaker's Library of Business Stories, Anecdotes, and Humor by Joe Griffith, Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1990

...as writers, our aim is communication, and the effectiveness of communication should be measured by the quality of its reception, not by the quality of its transmission.
 Ken Goddard The three-page sequence formerly at www.istc.org.uk/3page.htm.

Quality: Characteristic or standard measure of excellence; basic characteristic of something. Quality is a measure of the degree to which something meets a standard.
 Jack P. Friedman Barron's Dictionary of Business Terms, Second Edition

"A task well done is its own reward."
 R W Emerson

"The first absolute of Quality Management is: QUALITY HAS TO BE DEFINED AS CONFORMANCE TO REQUIREMENTS, NOT AS GOODNESS."
 Philip B Crosby Quality Without Tears, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984, P.64

Quality - Those attributes of a product or service that the customer attaches value to. Depending on the customer's focus, "Quality" may include surface finish, timeliness,
size, cost, reliability, or other factors."
Joseph R Jablonski Implementing Total Quality Management: Competing in the 1990s, Technical Management Consortium, 1990