Apollo 8 was planned as a test of the lunar module in Earth orbit. But the lunar module would not be ready before early 1969. On Friday, August 9, 1968, the NASA manager George Low proposed sending Apollo 8 to the Moon instead. That same afternoon, he and three colleagues flew to Huntsville to discuss it.
NASA then had only four months to prepare. The flight in December 1968 became the first human voyage to another celestial body.
“It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Franklin D. Roosevelt said this on May 22, 1932, at the commencement of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.
Roosevelt was governor of New York and was running for president. In the same speech he said: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” He won the election that November.
“Improvise, adapt, overcome” is an unofficial motto of the US Marines. The earliest record that the word researcher Barry Popik found is the 1986 film Heartbreak Ridge. Clint Eastwood plays a Marine gunnery sergeant. He tells his men: “You’re Marines now. You adapt. You overcome. You improvise.”
Some writers say Marines used the words long before the film. Popik found no printed evidence for that. By April 1988 Jack Clark was quoting it: “It’s like Clint Eastwood said, ‘You’ve got to improvise, adapt and overcome.'”
An American who quits a job is expected to give two weeks’ notice. Yet in most cases no law requires it. The employment nonprofit Legal Aid at Work says “there is no legal requirement that you do so.”
The custom rests on other reasons. Minnesota’s labor department says: “Courtesy and time to collect accrued benefits are reasons why notice is given.”
On November 14, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told a defense conference: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” He said he had heard it “long ago in the Army.” His reason: “the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.”
Another version, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable,” appears in Richard Nixon’s book Six Crises (1962). Nixon was paraphrasing Eisenhower.
The GPRA Modernization Act, signed on January 4, 2011, sets the planning calendar of federal agencies. Each agency’s strategic plan must cover at least four years. “As needed, the head of the agency may make adjustments to the strategic plan.”
Each agency also publishes a performance plan every year. Progress on the priority goals is reviewed “not less than quarterly.”
Every domestic American public company reports to investors by the quarter. It files a Form 10-Q for each of the first three quarters of its fiscal year, with unaudited financial statements, and an annual report on Form 10-K. Companies, analysts and the financial press speak of Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4.
In September 2025 President Trump called for an end to quarterly reporting. On May 5, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed letting companies file a semiannual report on a new Form 10-S. Under the proposal, a company that does not choose this option stays on quarterly reporting. As of October 2026 the proposal had not been adopted.
In 1997 Apple launched an advertising campaign called “Think different.” It began a few months after Steve Jobs returned to the company as interim CEO. The television commercial, narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, opened with these words: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.”
It ended: “Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.” The agency was TBWA\Chiat\Day. The campaign went on to play a key role in Apple’s recovery.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” The line comes from his working notes for The Last Tycoon, published in 1941, after his death. Americans often quote it only to disprove it. In 2013, NPR used it in a report on politicians who had “fallen from grace only to rise again and disprove the line”: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford.
Fitzgerald had used the phrase earlier, around 1932, in the essay “My Lost City.” There he wrote: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.”
The USA PATRIOT Act became law on October 26, 2001, six weeks after the September 11 attacks. Senator Patrick Leahy later recalled that he and House Majority Leader Dick Armey “insisted that we add a sunset for certain governmental powers.” Those provisions would expire at the end of 2005 unless Congress renewed them.
Leahy said the sunset “ensured that we would revisit the PATRIOT Act.” In March 2006, Congress made 14 of the 16 expiring provisions permanent. The other two received new sunsets of four years.