Fred Brooks Quotes

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

The game is a game, and things happen, and you can't always execute your plan as perfectly as you'd like to.

Any plan conceived in moderation must fail when the circumstances are set in extremes.

There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.

No matter how much you plan and prepare, things can still go wrong.

Things don't always go according to plan. That's life and that's government.

There's nothing wrong with a plan, but remember Von Moltke's famous dictum that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The danger is a plan that seduces us into thinking failure is impossible and adaptation is unnecessary - a kind of ‘Titanic' plan, unsinkable (until it hits the iceberg).

I always try to plan things out, but they never work out the way I expect.

When you plan something, it never works.

In this business, you just never know from day to day. It's one reason I held off getting too involved in entertainment. I like being able to plan, I like to know what I'm going to be doing.

You can make plans but if the opposition plays well, then all your plans become worthless.

We cannot assume that past successes will insure future successes.

You have to expect failure; not everything is going to work.

If you make enough decisions in life, you’re bound to make some of them wrong.

Luck is not scalable. Luck is not a national strategy.

Every time I try to plan something or assume that something's going to happen, it never works out like that.

Everything cannot go right all the time.

I think expectations are sometimes dangerous things. I think the only thing you can be sure of is that it won't go to plan. I think that's the only thing that's definite.

It's good to plan, but you just never know.

If you throw the ball 60 times, you are going to make miss some of them. That kind of happens.

In this business, you can't make any plans.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

Always plan for the fact that no plan ever goes according to plan.

It's like that old expression: "Men plan and god laughs." You sort of see that in the television world, where you have an idea where things are heading and you have a plan and sort of start off in that general direction, but you wind up taking all these side paths and whatnot - if you're lucky.