Schedule Quotes (5 quotes)
Cheops’ Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
In 'From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long', Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 259. Note: Cheops built the Great Pyramid at Giza. Of course, exceptions do exist, for example, the Empire State Building was built speedily, and under budget.
Groves hated the weather, and the weathermen; they represented chaos and the messengers of chaos. Weather violated boundaries, ignored walls and gates, failed to adhere to deadlines, disobeyed orders. Weather caused delays. The weather forecasters had opposed the [atomic bomb] test date for months—it was set within a window of unfavorable conditions: thunderstorms, rain, high winds, inversion layers. Groves had overridden them. … Groves saw it as a matter of insubordination when the weather forecasters refused to forecast good weather for the test.
In Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (1999), 312. For the attitude of Groves toward the weather see his, 'Some Recollections of July 16, 1945', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Jun 1970), 26, No. 6, 27.
If a project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and exact schedule at the beginning. And if you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.
From interview with Technology Review, quoted in Douglas Martin, 'Joseph Gavin, Who Helped Put First Man on Moon, Dies at 90', New York Times (4 Nov 2010)
If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker’s son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother’s championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym and set a schedule for himself that he adhereded to for four full years—in the school year, three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day.
A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton
The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule is forgotten.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
