A clever quote saves us from having to think!

(paraphrased from some original quote I can't remember)

Yes, but in this case someone else did the thinking for you and it is actually pretty accurate. If the only time you care about quality is when you are being checked, audited or supervised then it will not work.

Quality needs to be infused all across the board and needs to be reinforced from the management downwards throughout the whole organization, not just in the quality control department.

So Ford was definitely on to something and beat mr. Demming by a couple of decades on that particular insight. It's no surprise that both of them had a lot of these insights in the automotive industry to begin with, where warranties can very rapidly eat up the profit margin on the sale.

isn’t this like saying quality code is code that is correct without unit tests? They seem unrelated

They are related in that quality code is code that is both correct now and can easily be made correct when things change--and things always change. Unit tests are what enable correctness in the future.

Or more like, you write unit tests even if no one asked you to.