Top 100 Laurence J Peter Quotes
#1. Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.
Laurence J. Peter
#3. If you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don't need advice.
Laurence J. Peter
#4. Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter
#8. Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.
Laurence J. Peter
#9. Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
Laurence J. Peter
#10. Many an optimist has become rich simply by buying out a pessimist.
Laurence J. Peter
#11. Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#12. As the farmer said, I'm not greedy, all I want is the land next to mine.
Laurence J. Peter
#14. The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#15. Aristotle's axiom: The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Laurence J. Peter
#17. Middle age is when you stop criticizing the older generation and start criticizing the younger one.
Laurence J. Peter
#18. Nobody can be perfect unless he admits his faults, but if he has faults how can he be perfect?
Laurence J. Peter
#20. When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation.
Laurence J. Peter
#21. America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.
Laurence J. Peter
#22. Middle age is when anything new in the way you feel is most likely a symptom.
Laurence J. Peter
#24. It is wise to remember that you are one of those who can be fooled some of the time.
Laurence J. Peter
#25. Home is where the college student home for the holidays isn't.
Laurence J. Peter
#26. Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status
Laurence J. Peter
#27. The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.
Laurence J. Peter
#28. Marriage is a good deal like taking a bath-not so hot once you get accustomed to it.
Laurence J. Peter
#29. You could generally inform a real close friend: when you have manufactured a idiot of on your own he does not truly feel you've finished a long lasting job.
Laurence J. Peter
#30. Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.
Laurence J. Peter
#31. The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.
Laurence J. Peter
#32. Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car.
Laurence J. Peter
#33. A staff increase may produce a temporary improvement, but the promotion process eventually produces its effect on the newcomers and they, too, rise to their levels of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#34. The surest sign that you haven't any sense is to argue with one who hasn't.
Laurence J. Peter
#35. The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of bulls; the soldier details his wounds, the shepherd his sheep.
Laurence J. Peter
#36. As individuals we tend to climb to our levels of incompetence. We behave as though up is better and more is better, and yet all around us we see the tragic victims of this mindless escalation.
Laurence J. Peter
#37. Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
Laurence J. Peter
#40. Many a man, under the old and the new systems, has made the upward step from candidate to legislator, only to achieve his level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#41. An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to.
Laurence J. Peter
#42. The modern child will answer you back before you've said anything.
Laurence J. Peter
#43. Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
Laurence J. Peter
#44. There are some men who in a fifty-fifty proposition insist on getting the hyphen too.
Laurence J. Peter
#45. Cleaning anything involves making something else dirty, but anything can get dirty without something else getting clean.
Laurence J. Peter
#46. I inherited my ability from both parents; my mother's ability for spending money, and my father's ability for not earning it.
Laurence J. Peter
#47. He must examine his objectives and see that true progress is achieved through moving forward to a better way of life, rather than upward to total life incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#48. Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
Laurence J. Peter
#49. Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.
Laurence J. Peter
#51. My problem is I say what I'm thinking before I think what I'm saying.
Laurence J. Peter
#52. The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.
Laurence J. Peter
#53. Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
Laurence J. Peter
#54. When a New Yorker looks like he has a suntan, it's probably rust.
Laurence J. Peter
#56. If we lacked imagination enough to foresee something better, life would indeed be a tragedy.
Laurence J. Peter
#57. There are more pretty photographs of women than there are photographs of pretty women.
Laurence J. Peter
#58. A free press is one that prints a dictator's speech but doesn't have to.
Laurence J. Peter
#60. No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a camel - anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform effectively under such difficult conditions.
Laurence J. Peter
#61. Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wave making.
Laurence J. Peter
#62. 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.
Laurence J. Peter
#64. There is no stigma attached to recognizing a bad decision in time to install a better one.
Laurence J. Peter
#66. Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.
Laurence J. Peter
#68. 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.
Laurence J. Peter
#69. As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't.
Laurence J. Peter
#70. Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Laurence J. Peter
#71. Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.
Laurence J. Peter
#72. Computers can solve all kinds of problems except the unemployment problem they create.
Laurence J. Peter
#73. A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know.
Laurence J. Peter
#74. An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.
Laurence J. Peter
#75. Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
Laurence J. Peter
#76. The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time.
Laurence J. Peter
#77. The efficiency of a hierarchy is inversely proportional to its Maturity Quotient, M.Q. MQ = No. of employees at level of incompetence x 100 Total no. of employees in hierarchy Obviously, when MQ reaches 100, no useful work will be accomplished at all.
Laurence J. Peter
#78. 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.
Laurence J. Peter
#79. Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen lions-everyone but a school bus driver.
Laurence J. Peter
#80. A bore is a person who lights up the room simply by leaving it.
Laurence J. Peter
#82. A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.
Laurence J. Peter
#83. In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.
Laurence J. Peter
#85. We hate to have some people give us advice because we know how badly they need it themselves.
Laurence J. Peter
#86. The reason crime doesn't pay is that when it does, it is called a more respectable name.
Laurence J. Peter
#88. Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.
Laurence J. Peter
#89. Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity.
Laurence J. Peter
#90. In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#91. May your happiest days of the past be your saddest days of your future.
Laurence J. Peter
#92. Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.
Laurence J. Peter
#95. Slump, and the world slumps with you. Push and you push alone.
Laurence J. Peter
#96. The advantage of modern means of communication is they enable you to worry about things in all of the world
Laurence J. Peter
#98. If at first you don't succeed, you may be at your level of incompetence already.
Laurence J. Peter
#99. If the outcome is good, what's the difference between motives that sound good and good, sound motives?
Laurence J. Peter
#100. Employees in a hierarchy do not really object to incompetence (Peter's Paradox): they merely gossip about incompetence to mask their envy of employees who have Pull.
Laurence J. Peter
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
