On 22 April 2020, early in the Covid pandemic, Health Minister Jens Spahn spoke in the Bundestag during government question time. He asked for understanding for hard decisions made under uncertainty. He said: dass wir miteinander wahrscheinlich viel werden verzeihen müssen in ein paar Monaten, that in a few months we will probably have to forgive each other a great deal. Years later, the sentence was still quoted in the dispute over his purchases of face masks.
quotes
The buck stops here
Truman kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office reading exactly that, and used the phrase repeatedly to describe the presidency. The buck is passed, in American usage, from one person to another. The sign announces where the passing ends — at a named individual, in a specific room.
We choose to go to the moon
Kennedy at Rice University in 1962: we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
The difficulty is offered as the reason rather than the obstacle. Nobody had been to the moon, no vehicle existed that could go there, and the deadline was set anyway.
Failure is not an option
The line is associated with Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director during Apollo 13. He did not say it. It was written for the 1995 film.
Kranz liked it enough to use it as the title of his memoir. An invented line about American determination was adopted by the man it was invented for.
Winning isn’t everything
The line is usually credited to Vince Lombardi, though it was first said by UCLA coach Red Sanders. Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
It is the more absolute version of an earlier, softer sentence, and it is the absolute version that stuck.
Cash value
America produced one original school of philosophy, and it is named after practical consequence. In Pragmatism (1907) William James asked of any belief: what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?
He described the pragmatic method as looking away from first things, principles, categories and supposed necessities, and toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
And he put the conclusion as bluntly as it can be put: truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
To the things themselves
To the things themselves. Husserl’s demand, and the founding instruction of phenomenology: set aside theory, assumption and inherited interpretation, and attend to what is actually there.
The most abstract philosophical movement Germany produced began by insisting on the concrete.
Disagree and commit
In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Bezos described the practice directly: if you have conviction on a direction even though there is no consensus, say I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?
He added that he does it himself, all the time.
The phrase names the sequence exactly. The disagreement is voiced, and then the decision is executed as though it had not been.
Edison’s actual words
The quote everyone knows — I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work — is a later paraphrase. Edison is not recorded saying it.
The documented version comes from his associate Walter S. Mallory, in the 1910 biography Edison: His Life and Inventions. Edison had run over nine thousand experiments on a nickel-iron battery without success. When Mallory offered sympathy, Edison replied: results, why man, I have gotten a lot of results, I know several thousand things that won’t work.
Not the light bulb, and not ten thousand. But the reframe is genuine and it is his: a failed experiment is a result.
Seventy percent
In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had — and that if you wait for 90 percent, in most cases you are being slow.
He added the necessary companion: either way, you need to be good at quickly recognising and correcting bad decisions.
The threshold is named as a number, published to shareholders, and adopted across American business as a rule of thumb.