W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Quality has to be caused, not controlled.

It's impossible to have zero defects.

The "patron saint" of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.

Deliver total quality to every customer every day.

Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.

Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.

Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.

Quality is everyone's responsibility.

The cost of quality is the expense of doing things wrong.

'Quality' means what will sell and do a customer some good - at least try to.

Consumer accountability drives quality and efficiency.

Quality will save our company.

When you're out of quality, you're out of business.

Quality means conformance to requirements, not elegance.

Quality is free. It's not a gift, but it's free. The 'unquality' things are what cost money.

Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality.

Quality is such an attractive banner that sometimes we think we can get away with just waving it, without doing the hard work necessary to achieve it.

For much of Toyota's history, we have ensured the quality and reliability of our vehicles by placing a device called an andon cord on every production line - and empowering any team member to halt production if there's an assembly problem. Only when the problem is resolved does the line begin to move again.

It is in Toyota's DNA that mistakes made once will not be repeated.

In a true zero-defects approach, there are no unimportant items.

Quality is easy to talk but hard to make.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

The long and short of it is, we need more rigor in all kinds of programs.