correction

A young lady went into a bookstore and asked the clerk for Irving Stone's book, "Immoral Wife." "The title is "Immortal Wife," the clerk replied. "I'll get it for you." "Oh, please don't bother, If that's the correct name of the book, I don't think I'd care for it. I had something else in mind."

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

Believe, if you will, that there may have been faults in our industrial system, yet the fact remains that the welfare of the average man has not so far advanced under any other form of government, and that whatever evil exists will not be corrected by delegating to government, with all its weaknesses, the authority to run and control all business and to control the daily lives and activities of laboring mankind. Nor will any existing waste and extravagance of government be eliminated or appreciably diminished until the average man realizes that the burden of paying its bills will, through direct or indirect taxation, ultimately fall upon him, his children or his children's children.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Mistakes are costly and somebody must pay. The time to correct a mistake is before it is made. The causes of mistakes are, first, "I didn't know;" second, "I didn't think;" third, "I didn't care."

There is perhaps no surer mark of folly, than to attempt to correct natural infirmities of those we love.

...[E.H.] Moore ws presenting a paper on a highly technical topic to a large gathering of faculty and graduate students from all parts of the country. When half way through he discovered what seemed to be an error (though probably no one else in the room observed it). He stopped and re-examined the doubtful step for several minutes and then, convinced of the error, he abruptly dismissed the meeting -- to the astonishment of most of the audience. It was an evidence of intellectual courage as well as honesty and doubtless won for him the supreme admiration of every person in the group -- an admiration which was in no wise diminished, but rather increased, when at a later meeting he announced that after all he had been able to prove the step to be correct.

While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man as unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51% of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision.

There comes a point in any organization where too much supervision means that supervisors spend too much time writing memorandums to one another, making needless telephone calls to one another, and the like, with no more productive work being accomplished in the aggregate, and possibly even less. We must strike the correct balance between too much supervision, and too little supervision.

To every problem there is already a solution, whether you know it or not. To every sum in there is already a correct answer, whether the mathematician has found it or not.