The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.

Doesn’t that feel more powerful? Try it. Maybe instead of “fault” you prefer the word “responsibility,” but the idea is the same. Think of every bad thing that happened to you, and imagine that you happened to it.

it’s human nature to assume that when we see a mistake, it’s due to defects in someone else’s department, knowledge, or character,

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better

When people in my company would complain about one thing or another being broken, such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault.

In science, mistakes always precede the truth.

Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it's the doctor's fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it's always 'Thank God,' and when the patient dies, it's always blame the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer fucking novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.

People who think they’re generous to a fault usually think that’s their only fault.

A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister, when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall.

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.

Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.

mistakes and failures are a part of every project, particularly in ones like ours where we work on a number of systems and various teams are responsible for different stages, where even a small error at one stage can put to waste years of hard work. Dr Sarabhai used these mistakes as gateways for innovation and the development of new systems. He had the ability to look beyond the specific error and read what lay behind it. He kept room for errors and instead tried to analyse how we could make them manageable, so that we ruled the project, and not our fear of failure.

Faults are soon copied.