Top 100 Scott Adams Quotes
#1. In fact, most people are being squeezed in their little cubicle, and their creativity is forced out elsewhere, because the company can't use it. The company is organized to get rid of variants.
Scott Adams
#2. Skeptics," he said, "suffer from the skeptics' disease
the problem of being right too often.
Scott Adams
#3. I had several different bosses during the early years of 'Dilbert.' They were all pretty sure I was mocking someone else.
Scott Adams
#4. This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.
Scott Adams
#5. Moslem: people who believe suicide is a good way to get laid.
Scott Adams
#6. A matador is a guy who didn't have enough people skills to be promoted to serial killer.
Scott Adams
#7. If you give an ant infinite time, it can move a mountain all by itself.
Scott Adams
#8. It's hard to argue with the government. Remember, they are they run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so they must know a thing or two about satisfying women.
Scott Adams
#9. Lately ... the Peter Principle has given way to the "Dilbert Principle." The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
Scott Adams
#10. Everyone says there's a lack of leadership in the world these days. I think we should all be thankful, because the only reason for leadership is to convince people to do things that are either dangerous (like invading another country) or stupid (working extra hard without extra pay).
Scott Adams
#11. If your boss gets drunk and offers to photocopy her posterior, do not helpfully suggest pressing reduce 75%.
Scott Adams
#12. Dilbert: You joined the "Flat Earth Society?" Dogbert: I believe the earth must be flat. There is no good evidence to support the so-called "round earth theory." Dilbert: I think Christopher Columbus would disagree. Dogbert: How convenient that your best witness is dead.
Scott Adams
#13. You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public
Scott Adams
#14. Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.
Scott Adams
#15. These days it seems like any idiot with a laptop computer can churn out a business book and make a few bucks. That's certainly what I'm hoping. It would be a real letdown if the trend changed before this masterpiece goes to print.
Scott Adams
#16. Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don't let it leave until I extract that value.
Scott Adams
#17. If you think your odds of solving your problem are bad, don't rule out the possibility that what is really happening is that you are bad at estimating odds.
Scott Adams
#18. If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.
Scott Adams
#19. It is better for your career to do nothing, than to do something and attract criticism.
Scott Adams
#20. I have an endless stream of suggestions coming in from readers who are in cubicles. That keeps me going.
Scott Adams
#21. You don't have to be a person of influence to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.
Scott Adams
#22. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt.
Scott Adams
#23. He was deader than a shrunken head at a Hackey Sack festival.
Scott Adams
#24. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That's exactly how you look to them.
Scott Adams
#25. One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.
Scott Adams
#26. Our arrogance
causes us to imagine special value in this temporary collection
of molecules. Why do we perceive more spiritual value
in the sum of our body parts than on any individual cell in
our body? Why don't we hold funerals when skin cells die?
Scott Adams
#27. Never assume you understand the odds of things. I
Scott Adams
#28. Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap, and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt.
Scott Adams
#29. Methods for predicting the future: 1) read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards, or crystal balls ... collectively known as "nutty methods;" 2) put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer ... commonly referred to as "a complete waste of time."
Scott Adams
#30. Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to want to exercise.
Scott Adams
#31. Technology will definitely solve all our problems, but in the process it will create brand new ones. But that's O.K. because the most you can expect from life is to get to solve better and better problems.
Scott Adams
#32. No matter how many times I visit New York City, I am always struck by the same thing - a yellow taxicab.
Scott Adams
#33. Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.
Scott Adams
#34. When virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
Scott Adams
#35. When life gives you lemons ... choke on them and die ... you stupid lemon eater.
Scott Adams
#36. Managing your personal energy is like managing budgets in a company.
Scott Adams
#37. By definition, risk-takers often fail. So do morons. In practice it's difficult to sort them out.
Scott Adams
#38. Happiness has more to do with where you are heading than where you are.
Scott Adams
#39. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I'm not satisfied knowing that I'll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again.*
Scott Adams
#40. Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners.
Scott Adams
#41. This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.
Scott Adams
#42. Have you ever noticed that things that don't kill you make you weaker? And great minds don't think alike. If they did, the patent office would only have about fifty inventions. I started getting suspicious when I cried over spilt milk and the cashier took it off my bill. - Wally
Scott Adams
#43. If you think of your bad behavior as a lifestyle choice, as in "being yourself" or "just being honest," you might be ignoring the cost to your personal energy.
Scott Adams
#44. Priority-wise, it simply makes sense to take care of yourself before you start searching for a higher meaning. You aren't much good to anyone else if you're unhealthy, a financial burden, or an emotional basket case. Fix yourself before you turn outward. It's best for everyone.
Scott Adams
#45. There's kind of a toll you have to pay with a cat; if you don't pet her for 10 minutes she'll bother you for six hours.
Scott Adams
#46. Good advertising can make people buy your product even if it sucks ... A dollar spent on brainwashing is more cost-effective than a dollar spent on product improvement.
Scott Adams
#47. You already barely exist. Disappearing entirely won't be that much of a change.
Scott Adams
#48. Newsreader: A huge asteroid could destroy Earth! And by coincidence, that's the subject of tonight's miniseries. Dogbert: In science, researchers proved that this simple device can keep idiots off your television screen. [TV remote control] Click.
Scott Adams
#49. And bring me a hard copy of the Internet so I can do some serious surfing.
Scott Adams
#50. I'm predicting that we'll finally have a computer will search my e-mail automatically and delete every message that begins with 'thought you'd be interested,' and then give an electrical shock to the sender to remind him or her to stop send that kind of message.
Scott Adams
#51. Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.
Scott Adams
#52. There is more information in one thimble of reality
than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is
beyond the human brain to understand the world and its
environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified
illusions that act as a replacement for understanding.
Scott Adams
#53. We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.
Scott Adams
#54. Reality is always controlled by the people who are the most insane.
Scott Adams
#55. My definition of happiness is that it's a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind.
Scott Adams
#56. Failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight.
Scott Adams
#57. If you don't believe your salmon is wild, ask it to fetch your newspaper and see what happens.
Scott Adams
#58. Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching.
Dogbert's Motto
Scott Adams
#59. Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
Scott Adams
#60. Success is entirely accessible, even if you happen to be a huge screw-up 95 percent of the time.
Scott Adams
#61. You can't keep all bad luck from finding you, but you can fortify yourself to the point where the smaller stuff bounces off.
Scott Adams
#62. Dogbert gazing at night sky No matter how bad the day is, the stars are always there. Dilbert Actually, many of them burned out years ago, but their light is just now reaching earth. DogbertThank you for shattering my comfortable misconception. DilbertIt's the miracle of science.
Scott Adams
#63. If a job's worth doing, it's too hard.
Scott Adams
#64. Hard work is rewarding. Taking credit for other people's hard work is rewarding and faster.
Scott Adams
#65. Boss: I just heard that light travels faster than sound. I'm wondering if I should shout when I speak, just so my lips appear to sync-up with my words.
Scott Adams
#66. I'm slowly becoming a convert to the principle that you can't motivate people to do things, you can only demotivate them. The primary job of the manager is not to empower but to remove obstacles.
Scott Adams
#67. Sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
Scott Adams
#68. Am I getting smart with you? How would you know?
Scott Adams
#69. Dilbert: I'm obsessed with inventing a perpetual motion machine. Most scientists think it's impossible, but I have something they don't. Dogbert: A lot of spare time? Dilbert: Exactly.
Scott Adams
#70. Losers have goals. Winners have systems.
Scott Adams
#71. Ask a deeply religious Christian if he'd rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don't seem so bad lately.
Scott Adams
#72. Caring about the quality of your work causes stress. Stress can kill you. Maintain good health by remembering that the stockholders are complete strangers who have never done anything for you.
Scott Adams
#73. I used to be stupid but I've turned that situation around 360 degrees.
Scott Adams
#74. The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you're certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the only thing you're gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you.
Scott Adams
#75. If success were easy, everyone would do it. It takes effort. That fact works to your advantage because it keeps lazy people out of the game.
Scott Adams
#77. Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.
Scott Adams
#78. 'Dilbert' became popular during the downsizing of the '90s, and job security was a major theme of the strip.
Scott Adams
#79. Awareness does not come from receiving new information. It comes from rejecting old information.
Scott Adams
#80. It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.
Scott Adams
#81. Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.
Scott Adams
#82. Common sense isn't a real thing. And its ugly cousin, fairness, is a concept invented so dumb people could participate in arguments.
Scott Adams
#83. Man is a game playing animal and a computer is another way to play games.
Scott Adams
#84. There is no idea so bad that it cannot be made to look brilliant with the proper application of fonts and color.
Scott Adams
#85. It's smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills.
Scott Adams
#86. I keep hearing the argument that some things are constitutional while other things are not. The idea is that we should be in favor of all the things that were decided over 200 years ago by a bunch of slave-owning cross-dressers who pooped in holes.
Scott Adams
#87. But never being wrong is no proof that
the method of testing is sound for all cases
Scott Adams
#88. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day.
Scott Adams
#89. Your brain can only process a tiny portion of your environment,
It risks being overwhelmed by the volume
of information that bombards you every waking moment.
Your brain compensates by filtering out the 99.9 percent of
your environment that doesn't matter to you.
Scott Adams
#90. The computer cuts my production time in half. I love it.
Scott Adams
#91. One way to compensate for a tiny brain is to pretend to be dead.
Scott Adams
#92. I should have written that down.
- Dilbert
Scott Adams
#93. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
#94. If I had to pick one quality that best predicts success (other than wanting to be successful) it would be the willingness to risk embarrassment.
Scott Adams
#95. Failure is a resource that can be managed,
Scott Adams
#96. I can't bring myself to believe in a God with a personality like my own. I base that on the paucity of lightning attacks on people who deserve it.
Scott Adams
#97. To err is human. To cover it up is weasel.
Scott Adams
#98. Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn.
Scott Adams
#99. Why aren't you signed up for the 401K? I'd never be able to run that far.
Scott Adams
#100. This happens to me: I have this great idea and then I make the mistake of telling someone else.
Scott Adams
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top