Dilbert Quotes

If you spend all your time arguing with people who are nuts, you'll be exhausted and the nuts will still be nuts.

Everybody is somebody's else's weirdo

Always remember that as long as other people are gullible, there's no limit to what you can achieve.

There is no idea so bad that it cannot be made to look brilliant with the proper application of fonts and color.

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

Hard work is rewarding. Taking credit for other people's hard work is rewarding and faster.

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.

The job isn't done until you've blamed someone for the parts that went wrong.

I should have written that down. - Dilbert

Reality is always controlled by the people who are the most insane.

The main difference between marketing and fraud is that criminals have to pay for their own alcohol.

If you want to kill an idea without being identified as the assassin, suggest that the legal department take a look at it.

Be careful that what you write does not offend anybody or cause problems within the company. The safest approach is to remove all useful information

Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.

Dogbert to Dilbert "My invention can detect human stupidity. It has a very simple interface. All I do is point it at people." "Then what does it do?" "Why would it need to do anything else?

The marketing department uses many advanced techniques to match products and buyers in a way that mximizes profits. For example, they give away keychains.

Your shower is ready - I turned it on last night.

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.

You can't accommodate a hundred different opinions, and you can't ignore them. All you can do is provide people with the illusion that they participated in the decision. For some reason, that's enough to make people happy." This is the basis for all democracies.

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.

STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that “life sucks.” STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mind-set that “my life sucks.” Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip. STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto “I’m great (and you’re not).” According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage “have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors.’” STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that “we’re great (and they’re not).” This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe. STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that “life is great.” (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)

Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

Sometimes idiots can accomplish wonderful things.

Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

Es gibt zwei Arten von Menschen: intelligente und attraktive Leute wie Sie [...] und die sechs Milliarden Idioten, die uns im Weg herumstehen.

And if you think it’s all about information, you ought to give up fiction and get a job writing instruction manuals—Dilbert’s cubicle awaits.

Even Dilbert mocks coaching—and there’s no surer sign of mainstream success than that.

For humans, honesty is a matter of degree. Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth.

In the Moonies, I was taught to suppress negative thoughts by using a technique called thought stopping. I repeated the phrase “Crush Satan” or “True Parents” (the term used to describe Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han) whenever any doubt arose in my mind. Another way to control thoughts is through the use of loaded language, which, as Lifton pointed out, is purposely designed to invoke an emotional response. When I look at the list of thought-controlling techniques—reducing complex thoughts into clichés and platitudinous buzz words; forbidding critical questions about the leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate or evil—it is astounding how many Trump exploits. As I have mentioned, one of the most effective techniques in the thought control arsenal is hypnosis. Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, described Trump, with his oversimplifications, repetitions, insinuating tone of voice, and use of vivid imagery, as a Master Wizard in the art of hypnosis and persuasion.

You know you're in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think 'A' get together and compromise on 'B.

Theory of Evolution (Summary) First, there were some amoebas. Deviant amoebas adapted better to the environment, thus becoming monkeys. Then came Total Quality Management.

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic series, explains his success this way: I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

People hate change, and with good reason. Change makes us stupider, relatively speaking. Our knowledge -as a percentage of all the things that can be known- goes down a tick every time something changes. And frankly, if we're talking about a percentage of the total knowledge in the universe, most of us aren't that many basis points superior to our furniture to begin with. I hate to wake up in the morning only to find that the intellectual gap between me and my credenza has narrowed. That's no way to start the day.

It’s a rare company I visit these days that doesn’t have a Dilbert cartoon posted somewhere. I guess the message of these cartoons is “Our company is in some ways like Dilbert’s company, ” or, even worse, “My boss is in some ways like Dilbert’s boss.” When I encounter these cartoons, I always want to find the person who posted them and ask, “Yes, but are you like Dilbert?” Are you keeping your head down? Are you accepting senseless direction when it’s offered? Are you letting the bureaucracy dominate at the expense of the real goals? If so, I’d like to tell that person, then you’re part of the problem. At the risk of being a total killjoy, I propose that you look at the next Dilbert cartoon that falls under your eye in a totally different way. I propose that you ask yourself about Dilbert’s role in whatever corporate nonsense is the butt of the joke. Ask yourself, How should Dilbert have responded? (The real Dilbert, of course, never responds at all.) How could Dilbert have made this funny situation distinctly nonfunny? What could he have done to put an end to such absurdities? There is always an obvious answer. Sometimes the action is one that would get Dilbert fired. It’s easy (and fair) to blame lousy management on lousy managers. But it’s not enough. It’s also necessary to blame the people who allow themselves to be managed so badly. At least partly at fault for every bad management move is some gutless Dilbert who allows it to happen.

I'm more of a sprinter than a marathoner when it comes to many aspects of life. For example, when I'm running. Over short distances--up to two yards--I can run faster than cheap panty hose on an itchy porcupine. But over long distances, I'm not so impressive. I try to compensate for my lack of long-distance endurance by having good form. I'm told that my running style is quite majestic. That's probably because I learned to run by watching nature films in which leopards chased frightened zebras. Now when I run, I open my eyes real wide and let my tongue slap the side of my face. If you saw it, you'd be saying, "That's very majestic." And then you'd run like a frightened zebra. That's why my homeowners association voted to ask me to do my jogging with a pillowcase over my head.

Some work in posh offices with glorious views, others in dreary cubicles with Dilbert cartoons and a free calendar.

Then there’s education. Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics.

Never use naughtiness in mixed company, unless your witticism is so funny that your audience will shoot tears of happiness out of their eyes with a velocity sufficient to powerwash a small bus. Any joke that falls short of that standard will make you lose respect in the eyes of everyone except your best friends, who, as you know, lost respect for you long ago.

Hey, Bob.” Taylor greeted him with a thump on the back. “How’s the kids?” “Like Dilbert says, ’bout as happy as a bunch of barefoot squirrels in a tire store.” Taylor snorted back a laugh.

No a los actos heroicos. Si necesitas que un héroe haga las cosas, tienes un problema. El esfuerzo heroico debe entenderse como un error de planeación. Basta de políticas absurdas. Toda política que parece ridícula probablemente lo es. Los formularios, reuniones, aprobaciones y normas absurdos son sólo eso: absurdos. Si tu oficina parece una caricatura de Dilbert, ponle remedio. Fuera idiotas. No lo seas, ni permitas esa conducta. Quienquiera que cause caos emocional, inspire miedo o temor o degrade o subestime debe ser parado en seco. Busca el flujo. Opta por la manera más tersa y sin contratiempos de hacer las cosas. Scrum consiste en permitir el mayor flujo posible.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to have a flexible schedule. I didn’t have one either for the first sixteen years of my corporate life. So I did the next best thing by going to bed early and getting up at 4:00 A.M. to do my creative side projects. One of those projects became the sketches for Dilbert. You might not think you’re an early-morning person. I didn’t think I was either. But once you get used to it, you might never want to go back. You can accomplish more by the time other people wake up than most people accomplish all day.

Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed. What’s the difference between a system and a goal? It’s a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

fourth text Kushner advised was necessary to understand Trump was Scott Adams’s book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, explains in Win Bigly that Trump’s misstatements of fact are not regrettable errors or ethical lapses, but part of a technique called “intentional wrongness persuasion.” Adams argues Trump “can invent any reality” for most voters on most issues, and “all you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do.” Kushner said that Scott Adams’s approach could be applied to Trump’s recent February 4 State of the Union speech when he had claimed, “Our economy is the best it has ever been.” The economy was indeed in excellent shape then, but not the best in history, Kushner acknowledged.

What’s the difference between systems and goals? It’s a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

1. It should be clear, concise, and understandable. Dilbert defines a vision statement as a “long awkward sentence that demonstrates management’s inability to think clearly.” Make sure you prove the notorious cartoon character wrong. 2. It should communicate, in actionable ways, the things you need to do to satisfy, impress, and keep your customers. 3. It should be consistent with other things you tell employees about the organization’s mission, brand promise, and purpose. 4. It should pass the employee “snicker test”: Reading it, whether on paper or out loud, should help your people better understand what to do, how to do it, and why to do it, not make them giggle, guffaw, and roll their eyes heavenward. It’s important that the service vision be ambitious yet grounded in reality, and not written as if it’s an advertising slogan.

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done. Dilbert newsletter 3.0, 1994 —Scott Adams

I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

So you must have seen the article on them today.” “Not yet, but I was just about to take a break. Gotta have my Dilbert fix.” “Is that the one about the office? I was a Calvin and Hobbes fan for years. Hated to see that stop and haven’t really gotten into any of the new ones. Guess I’m behind the times.” “You like what you like. Nothing wrong with that.” “That’s what my wife says.” De la Cruz’s eyes drifted around again. “So, a couple people said both of them came into this club last night.” “Calvin and Hobbes? One was a kid and the other a tiger. Neither would have gotten past my bouncers.” -De La Cruz & Xhex

My main job for the past few decades has been creating Dilbert. Making comics is a process by which you strip out the unnecessary noise from a situation until all that is left is the absurd-yet-true core.

I once wore a professional disguise and infiltrated a high-level business meeting just to get material for the Dilbert comic strip. On

I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.†

If you mine the data hard enough, you can also find messages from God. [Dogbert]

Why does good code rot so quickly into bad code? We have lots of explanations for it. We complain that the requirements changed in ways that thwart the original design. We bemoan the schedules that were too tight to do things right. We blather about stupid managers and intolerant customers and useless marketing types and telephone sanitizers. But the fault, dear Dilbert, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. We are unprofessional.

The organization ends up fully committed to doing things that most people in the organization know are ineffective or wasteful but that those same people pretend are not stupid and all keep doing. Meanwhile, observers on the outside laugh at these poor souls who are trapped in foolishness that they themselves realize is foolish. Companies do this kind of thing all the time. And the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams, has

Scot Adams, author of “Dilbert” — “Science shows that when you fake a smile long enough, you’ll eventually be happier”. I know that when I listen to music I smile. So I’m listening to Kashmir by Led Zeppelin right now. And smiling.

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams says, “It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.

To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word 'stronger' to include anything that makes you more capable. I’d ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn't kill him.

By the early-afternoon hours, if your brain is normal, it's running strictly on inertia and reflex. All you can do during those hours are the things that are exactly like other things you've done in similar situations. Creativity is out of the question. You might argue that you don't notice any difference in your thinking during the afternoon. That's because you're too dazed to notice anything during those hours. I'm sure it's true for me; I believe you could set my eyebrows on fire during the afternoon and I wouldn't notice until sometime the next morning.

People have been making jokes about office politics and bureaucratic idiocies long before Dilbert. But in the old days, you had to put up with those problems because you needed the big organization to do the job. Now, increasingly, you don’t. Goliath’s strength compensated for his clumsiness. But now the Davids can muscle up without all of the unnecessary bulk.

Part of the problem is, you've got a lot of D students left on the farm today," Joel said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. "The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There's been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course, that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the farm and put them to work in Dilbert's cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems." This isn't just the farmer's problem, either. "It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.

Explain it to me? Explain it to me?"Geneva's voice was rising, right along with the color in her face. "Let me tell you something, Dilbert Greathouse!" She shouted. "I have personally changed your diaper and wiped your snotty nose in that church nursery more times than I care to count. Do you want me to call your mama on the telephone and tell her you're down here sassing me and my sister in the middle of the county jail?" "N-n-no, ma'am," Dilbert said. Lila could see little beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, and if his cheeks got any redder they would surely catch fire. "Well then, you get that door open before I turn you over my knee and blister your broad behind right here in front of God and everybody! Press conference, my--oh, just open that door!

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat.

Dilbert comic strip, who condemned goal pursuit in his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Adams promoted an alternative: instead of goals, live your life by systems. A system is “something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.” For a cartoonist, that might be drawing one cartoon per day; for a writer, writing five hundred words per day. In contrast to goals, systems bring a steadier stream of

If you can’t find a game where the odds are stacked in your favor, create one. Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, says, “Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.

Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, says, “Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.20

He would dress a lot like Dilbert, only he'd be skinnier, and with a bumblebee-yellow pen and a clipboard. He'd have multiple facial tics and a quirky habit of raising a Vulcan eyebrow as if it were purely illogical to value privacy.

The popularity of Dilbert, The Office, and any number of other pop-culture windows on cubicle life attests to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar work.”2 It has been only in the past hundred years that work has become this way. In the centuries of civilization prior, many more of us had crafts and skills that gave us pride.

Another sad example that reduces motivation is the Dilbert-style identical cubicle that continuously reminds people that they are low in the hierarchy, not important enough to justify any investment in them, that the company is not expecting them to be around for a long time, and that they are basically replaceable.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, success in entrepreneurship isn’t necessarily related to being the best at any particular activity. Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic series, explains his success this way: I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.2

What you’re looking for is an unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it. The Dilbert pilot got an okay response from the test audience, but no one seemed enthusiastic. The project went no further.

Some humor experts say the secret to humor is to combine something unexpected with something bad and then make sure it's happening to someone else. But if that's all it took, serial killers would be winning comedy competitions.

Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics. And the ones who are unhappy with work can change jobs fairly easily. Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.

- I'm going to turn my attention to philanthropy. - Is that the study of people named Phil? - It's mostly about watching people beg, and having buildings named after me.

Purchase order... Budget transfer... Legal review... Accounting classification... Inventory... These steps are necessary to prevent employees from doing something uneconomical.