Laurence J. Peter quotes:

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  • Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

  • If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?

  • Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.

  • You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes.

  • Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

  • Don't believe in miracles - depend on them.

  • Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

  • Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.

  • If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

  • Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen lions-everyone but a school bus driver.

  • Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.

  • The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.

  • Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

  • An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.

  • Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.

  • The problem with temptation is that you may not get another chance.

  • Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car.

  • Nobody can be perfect unless he admits his faults, but if he has faults how can he be perfect?

  • Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.

  • The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.

  • If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else.

  • Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

  • Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.

  • A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

  • We are members of a strange species that devotes its energies to climbing the ladder of success in order to make money to buy things we don't like.

  • Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.

  • Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

  • Middle age is when the best exercise is one of discretion.

  • A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

  • There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.

  • Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny, and your hour-by-hour mental conduct produces power for change in your life. Develop a train of thought on which to ride. The nobility of your life as well as your happiness depends upon the direction in which that train of thought is going.

  • An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

  • Expert: a man who makes three correct guesses consecutively.

  • Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.

  • Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

  • It is wise to remember that you are one of those who can be fooled some of the time.

  • It's better to have loved and lost than to have to do forty pounds of laundry a week.

  • You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.

  • Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.

  • In the country of the blind, the one-eyed king can still goof up.

  • In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

  • Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

  • Home is where the college student home for the holidays isn't.

  • Noblest of all dogs is the hot-dog; it feeds the hand that bites it.

  • There are some men who in a fifty-fifty proposition insist on getting the hyphen too.

  • Few of us ever test our powers of deduction, except when filling out an income tax form

  • Men now monopolize the upper levels... depriving women of their rightful share of opportunities for incompetence.

  • As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't.

  • Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

  • There are more pretty photographs of women than there are photographs of pretty women.

  • The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time.

  • Middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.

  • Slump, and the world slumps with you. Push, and you push alone.

  • I inherited my ability from both parents; my mother's ability for spending money, and my father's ability for not earning it.

  • There is no stigma attached to recognizing a bad decision in time to install a better one.

  • If at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again.

  • America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.

  • Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.

  • America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.

  • There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought

  • The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of bulls; the soldier details his wounds, the shepherd his sheep.

  • When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout.

  • A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.

  • Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.

  • The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.

  • . . . if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don't need advice.

  • A bore is a person who lights up the room simply by leaving it.

  • A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of every paper before he destroys it.

  • A free press is one that prints a dictator's speech but doesn't have to.

  • A lawyer is a man who helps you get what is coming to him.

  • A man convinced against his will is not convinced.

  • A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know.

  • A rut is a grave with the ends knocked out.

  • A true friend will see you through when others see that you are through.

  • All science is concerned with the relationship of cause and effect. Each scientific discovery increases man's ability to predict the consequences of his actions and thus his ability to control future events.

  • An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to.

  • An optimist is one who makes the best of it when he gets the worst of it.

  • As the farmer said, "I'm not greedy, all I want is the land next to mine.

  • Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

  • Bore : A fellow who can change the subject back to his topic of conversation faster than you can change it back to yours.

  • Cleaning anything involves making something else dirty, but anything can get dirty without something else getting clean.

  • Computers can solve all kinds of problems except the unemployment problem they create.

  • Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame. Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices. In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

  • do it now. There may be a law against it tomorrow.

  • Don't knock the rich. When did a poor person give you a job?

  • Don't worry about middle age: you'll outgrow it.

  • Egypt: Where the Israelites would still be if Moses had been a bureaucrat.

  • Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.

  • Fools rush in where wise men fear to trade.

  • Give a child enough rope and he will trip you up.

  • He laughs best whose laugh lasts.

  • Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.

  • If at first you don't succeed, you may be at your level of incompetence already.

  • If we lacked imagination enough to foresee something better, life would indeed be a tragedy.

  • If you can't keep up, drag them down to your level.

  • Ignorance is the mother of research.

  • Ignorance once dispelled is difficult to reestablish.

  • In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

  • In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.

  • Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence.

  • Lead, follow or get of the way

  • Many an optimist has become rich simply by buying out a pessimist.

  • Many live by their wits but few by their wit.

  • Marriage is a good deal like taking a bath-not so hot once you get accustomed to it.

  • May your happiest days of the past be your saddest days of your future.

  • Middle age is when anything new in the way you feel is most likely a symptom.

  • Middle age is when it takes longer to rest than to get tired.

  • Middle age is when you stop criticizing the older generation and start criticizing the younger one.

  • Most hierarchies are nowadays so cumbered with rules and traditions, and so bound in by public laws, that even high employees do not have to lead anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction and setting the pace. They simply follow precedents, obey regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. Such employees lead only in the sense that the curved wooden figurehead leads the ship .

  • My problem is I say what I'm thinking before I think what I'm saying.

  • Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wave making.

  • Peter's Principle: In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetence.

  • Poetry is that which is lost in translation.

  • Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

  • Prejudice is one of the world's greatest labor-saving devices; it enables you to form an opinion without having to dig up the facts.

  • Reality is for people who can't face drugs.

  • Scientists are still trying to produce life in the laboratory, but it shouldn't be difficult if the laboratory assistant is pretty and willing.

  • The advantage of modern means of communication is they enable you to worry about things in all of the world

  • The cave-dweller's wife complained that he hadn't dragged her anywhere in months.

  • The devil could change. He was once an angel and may be evolving still.

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