Gordon Bell Quotes

If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of ten it will.

One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They're all hanging from a thread - sometimes literally.

To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.

Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.

When you try to do something bigger and more grandiose, a lot of times it's more apt to fall apart. It's a lot easier to lay down a bunch of singles than it is to get a home run.

Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same is true of bridges, buildings, or any structure or machine.

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

It’s like drinking water from a fire hose.

Almost everything you do fails. To develop a great success we must have thousands of failures along the way

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps. One hopes they won’t be fatal.

Terms are like shredded wheat - two are wonderful, but three might just be too many.

There are so many different things that create an alchemy of success. Just like there are so many different things that create an alchemy of a failure.

Bad things can happen even to the best players.

Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.

I can try to disable it," I said, "but if I mess up, this whole apartment is going to fill with gas. We'll die." Thalia swallowed. " I trust you. Just... don't mess it up.

Put all your eggs in one basket... the handle's going to break. Then all you've got is scrambled eggs.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity - rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers for a lack of understanding.

To copy is to invite disaster.

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.