Planning

When an encyclopaedia is published in instalments, the later volumes will always contain items which were certainly not included in the original schedule. An example which reflects high credit on the editor’s ingenuity is to be found in the first volume of the Schweizer Lexikon, which came out in the autumn of 1945. Look up ‘Atom bomb’ and you will see that the leads have been deleted from the column so as to gain an additional line for ‘Atom bomb, see Nuclear Physics’!

Sigfrid H. Steinberg, Encylopaedias, Signature, vol. 12, 1951, pp. 3–22, p. 20

We need to use the downtime, when things are calm, to prepare for when things get serious in the decades to come. The time we have now is valuable, and we need to make use of it.

Demis Hassabis, quoted in "Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk Cade Metz and the Feud over Killer Robots", Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud over Killer Robots, The New York Times, 2018

[I]f something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.

Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, London, 1840, p. 1