Donald Berwick Quotes

After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

That's the one thing I don't like hearing, when someone says, 'We'll see what happens, see what happens here, see what happens there.' Forget all of that.

Indistinctness is my forte.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Ambiguity in directors is a hard thing to deal with.

There's a time in your life where you're not quite sure where you are. You think everything's perfect, but it's not perfect... Then one day you wake up and you can't quite picture yourself in the situation you're in. But the secret is, if you can picture yourself doing anything in life, you can do it.

There's a gray area there that I'm satisfied is not gray.

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

I'm usually very attracted to things that I can't define. If something's too clear, it's very often not inspiring to me anymore.

I spend a substantial amount of my time endeavoring to fend off questions, and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear.

We hope vaguely, we dread precisely; our fears are infinitely more precise than our hopes

Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.

Everybody wants to have an empirical analysis of a relationship ending, but sometimes there's not that much clarity, and that's OK.

It's a murky world out there, and it's hard to figure things out sometimes.

It is... easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

...I am much better now at ambiguities.

The meaning of today will not be clear until tomorrow.

I don't want to lose too much of the mystery by hammering every detail to death.

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.