Cleaver’s Law
Eldridge Cleaver
You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.
Haldeman’s Law
H. R. 'Bob' Haldeman
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s going to be very tough to get it back in.
Holmes’s Second Law
Sherlock Holmes
It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
Liddell Hart’s Maxims
Basil Liddell-Hart
1. Adjust your end to your means - in effect don’t bite off more than you can chew.
2. Keep your objective always in mind, adapting plans to circumstances, remembering that there are more ways than one of gaining an objective and making sure that attainment of intermediate objectives is worthwhile. “To wander down a side-track is bad but to reach a dead end is worse.”
3. Choose the line (or course) of least expectation i.e. put yourself in your opponent’s shoes and take the line of action that he (or she) is least likely to foresee or forestall.
4. Exploit the line of least resistance - providing of course that it leads toward your ultimate objective.
5. Pursue a line of operation that offers alternate objectives. Your opponent will not be sure which objective to defend most strongly and you will have a better chance of gaining at least one of them - whichever he (or she) guards least - and perhaps of achieving one after the other.
6. Make sure that your plans and dispositions of forces are flexible. Any plan should provide for a next step quickly carried out in case of success or failure or - the more common outcome in war - partial success. (See also Publilius’s Maxims no. 469.)
7. Do not throw your weight into an offensive while your opponent is on guard. Unless the enemy is much inferior in strength, wait until his (or her) power of resistance or evasion is paralysed by disorganisation and demoralisation before making a real attack.
8. Do not renew an attack along the same line or in the same manner after it has once failed. Bringing up reinforcements is not enough since the enemy is likely to do the same and his (or her) success in repulsing you will have strengthened his (or her) morale.
Peers’ Law
John Peers
The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem.
Segal’s Law
Anon
A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
Burns’s Balance
Anon
If the assumptions are wrong, the conclusions aren’t likely to be very good.
Cutler Webster’s Law
Anon
There are two sides to every argument, unless a person is personally involved, in which case there is only one.
Forrester’s Laws
Jay W. Forrester
1. In complicated situations, efforts to improve things often tend to make them worse, sometimes much worse, on occasions calamitous.
2. In a complex social system the obvious commonsense solution to a problem will turn out to be wrong most of the time.
Murdoch’s Law of Patent Protection
Editor
Patents give you the right to sue; they don’t give you the money to sue.
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