Top 100 Laurence J Peter Quotes
#2. Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
Laurence J. Peter
#3. An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.
Laurence J. Peter
#4. A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know.
Laurence J. Peter
#5. Computers can solve all kinds of problems except the unemployment problem they create.
Laurence J. Peter
#6. Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.
Laurence J. Peter
#7. 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
#8. As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't.
Laurence J. Peter
#9. 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
#11. Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.
Laurence J. Peter
#13. There is no stigma attached to recognizing a bad decision in time to install a better one.
Laurence J. Peter
#14. The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time.
Laurence J. Peter
#15. 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
#16. Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wave making.
Laurence J. Peter
#17. 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
#19. A free press is one that prints a dictator's speech but doesn't have to.
Laurence J. Peter
#20. There are more pretty photographs of women than there are photographs of pretty women.
Laurence J. Peter
#21. If we lacked imagination enough to foresee something better, life would indeed be a tragedy.
Laurence J. Peter
#23. When a New Yorker looks like he has a suntan, it's probably rust.
Laurence J. Peter
#24. Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
Laurence J. Peter
#25. The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.
Laurence J. Peter
#26. Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.
Laurence J. Peter
#27. 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
#28. If the outcome is good, what's the difference between motives that sound good and good, sound motives?
Laurence J. Peter
#29. If at first you don't succeed, you may be at your level of incompetence already.
Laurence J. Peter
#31. The advantage of modern means of communication is they enable you to worry about things in all of the world
Laurence J. Peter
#32. Slump, and the world slumps with you. Push and you push alone.
Laurence J. Peter
#35. Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.
Laurence J. Peter
#36. May your happiest days of the past be your saddest days of your future.
Laurence J. Peter
#37. In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#38. 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
#39. My problem is I say what I'm thinking before I think what I'm saying.
Laurence J. Peter
#41. The reason crime doesn't pay is that when it does, it is called a more respectable name.
Laurence J. Peter
#42. We hate to have some people give us advice because we know how badly they need it themselves.
Laurence J. Peter
#44. In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.
Laurence J. Peter
#45. A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.
Laurence J. Peter
#47. A bore is a person who lights up the room simply by leaving it.
Laurence J. Peter
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. Home is where the college student home for the holidays isn't.
Laurence J. Peter
#53. It is wise to remember that you are one of those who can be fooled some of the time.
Laurence J. Peter
#55. Middle age is when anything new in the way you feel is most likely a symptom.
Laurence J. Peter
#56. 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
#57. When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation.
Laurence J. Peter
#59. Nobody can be perfect unless he admits his faults, but if he has faults how can he be perfect?
Laurence J. Peter
#60. Middle age is when you stop criticizing the older generation and start criticizing the younger one.
Laurence J. Peter
#62. Aristotle's axiom: The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Laurence J. Peter
#63. The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#64. Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status
Laurence J. Peter
#65. As the farmer said, I'm not greedy, all I want is the land next to mine.
Laurence J. Peter
#66. Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#67. Many an optimist has become rich simply by buying out a pessimist.
Laurence J. Peter
#68. Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
Laurence J. Peter
#69. Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.
Laurence J. Peter
#71. They lead only as the carved wooden figurehead leads the ship.
Laurence J. Peter
#73. Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter
#74. If you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don't need advice.
Laurence J. Peter
#78. Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.
Laurence J. Peter
#79. Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
Laurence J. Peter
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Cleaning anything involves making something else dirty, but anything can get dirty without something else getting clean.
Laurence J. Peter
#83. There are some men who in a fifty-fifty proposition insist on getting the hyphen too.
Laurence J. Peter
#84. Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
Laurence J. Peter
#85. The modern child will answer you back before you've said anything.
Laurence J. Peter
#86. An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to.
Laurence J. Peter
#87. 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
#89. Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.
Laurence J. Peter
#90. Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
Laurence J. Peter
#91. 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
#92. The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of bulls; the soldier details his wounds, the shepherd his sheep.
Laurence J. Peter
#93. The surest sign that you haven't any sense is to argue with one who hasn't.
Laurence J. Peter
#94. 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
#95. Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car.
Laurence J. Peter
#96. The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.
Laurence J. Peter
#97. Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.
Laurence J. Peter
#98. 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
#99. Marriage is a good deal like taking a bath-not so hot once you get accustomed to it.
Laurence J. Peter
#100. The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.
Laurence J. Peter
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