Laurence J. Peter Quotes

Don't believe in miracles - depend on them.

We hate to have some people give us advice because we know how badly they need it themselves.

Ignorance once dispelled is difficult to reestablish.

Fools rush in where wise men fear to trade.

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

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

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.

The reason crime doesn't pay is that when it does, it is called a more respectable name.

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

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.

It usually takes two people to make one of them angry.

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is that which is lost in translation.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Two can live as cheaply as one - if they both have good jobs.

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

Two things reduce prejudice: education and laughter.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The unexpected always happens.

They lead only as the carved wooden figurehead leads the ship.

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.

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

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

The modern child will answer you back before you've said anything.

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

A rut is a grave with the ends knocked out.

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

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

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

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

Many live by their wits but few by their wit.