Laurence J. Peter Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

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

Laurence J. Peter
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

Laurence J. Peter
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed king can still goof up.

Laurence J. Peter
On second thought, maybe the atheist cannot find God, for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.

Laurence J. Peter
In every organization there is a considerable accumulation of dead wood in the executive level.

Laurence J. Peter
Tact is the art of putting your foot down without stepping on anyone's toes.

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

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

Laurence J. Peter
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

Laurence J. Peter
America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.

Laurence J. Peter
My analysis…led me to formulate The Peter Principle: In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter
The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter
Egypt: Where the Israelites would still be if Moses had been a bureaucrat.

Laurence J. Peter
The only valid rule about the proper length of a statement is that it achieve its purpose effectively.

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

Laurence J. Peter
There are more pretty photographs of women than there are photographs of pretty women.

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

Laurence J. Peter
The surest sign that you haven't any sense is to argue with one who hasn't.

Laurence J. Peter
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
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
Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.

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

Laurence J. Peter
Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.

Laurence J. Peter
Occupational incompetence is everywhere. Have you noticed it? Probably we all have noticed it.

Laurence J. Peter
Work is done by those [employees] who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter
Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter
The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time.

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

Laurence J. Peter
Most hierarchies are nowadays so cumbered with rules and traditions, and so bound in by public laws, that even high employees do not have to lead anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction and setting the pace. They simply follow precedents, obey regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. Such employees lead only in the sense that the curved wooden figurehead leads the ship.

Laurence J. Peter