Albert Einstein Quotes

This quotation or parts of it are sometimes erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein.

See {234968} for an earlier, similar view.

See {611311} for a later similar view.

This principle is very important in all kinds of human activity. We design and test or pilot test products and programs of all kinds—governmental and not. The testing may uncover a flaw or problem, but the failure to find flaws or problems does NOT mean that they are not inherent in the program—they may well be there and have not been uncovered by the tests. Often when this occurs, we refer to them as “unintended consequences.”

Managers and leaders always make comparisons in order to hire and promote staff and the like. What St, Teresa warns against is making comparisons when communicating with individuals or publicly as people tend to react badly to open comparisons where they do not come out as the best. These Maxims would be useful for any political campaign staff or government agency.

This quotation may be apocryphal and not real. We have not been able to find an eyewitness or even a quotation the citation of which gave a date or suggested how the quote was ever made public given that it passed between these two men. However it is so frequently quoted that we have decided to include it. A further argument in its favor is that it fits the circumstances of the time. FDR had given Hopkins a huge budget and told Hopkins to get the American people working again. Hopkins did not believe in payments to the able bodied unless worked and his programs created an astounding array of jobs for the unemployed to do ranging from fixing benches in parks to writing poetry about poverty. He spend more money than any human being in history and started and implemented a nationwide program at a pace that has never been matched, Incredibly, no one was ever able to find any dishonesty in the administration, but it took years for the information of exactly what had going on at the local level to filter back to Washington. So the quote is plausible factually. Style-wise Hopkins was brutally honest with Roosevelt and others so well might have admitted that he did not know all that was going on in his programs. See {642829}.

While the context applied to making business policy decisions, he also advocated it for politics and managing government. If policy makers or managers speculate and then act to fix possible and imaginable problem, they will waste time and resources dealing with eventualities that may never come to pass. A better strategy is to obtain data, analysize that, and fix the problems that we know will occur.