Satirists From The United States

"A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful."

"If your debate partner leaves the realm of fact and reason for any of the diversions I mentioned, you just won the debate. Declare victory and bow out."

"I want to be clear that I'm not expressing a preference for ignoring facts."

"Facts don't matter. What matters is how you feel."

"The public didn't know who said it first, but it was the most powerful question in human history. In nine words it overturned centuries of tortured logic and magical thinking. It pushed superstition into a cage and gave common sense room to maneuver. [...] The question was translated into thousands of languages, published billions of times. In English it was "If God is so smart, why do you fart?""

"Extermination had begun. A thick rain of missiles streaked through the sky and landed on hospitals, schools, bridges, homes, mosques, businesses, and military targets. The missile crews and jet pilots didn't know what they were blowing up or why. [...] No one questioned why entire blocks — eventually entire cities — were being annihilated. Everyone did his job as if it were nothing more than delivering packages."

"Humanity is like a huge organic computer. The hardware is functioning fine — reproducing more humans, creating food, learning — but the software is broken. Beliefs are our software. When the software works properly, our beliefs help us survive. Sometimes there are glitches in the software, in the form of delusions that are harmful. My job is to remove the glitches."

"The fastest way to spot a weasel is to look at a shiny surface. The second-fastest way is to look for people who are certain about the future. When a person conveys a sense of certainty during times of great uncertainty, that is either a sign of mental illness called "leadership" or a sign of a weasel who is trying to get his way."

"The only person who wants real fairness is whoever has the worst life on earth, because he has nothing of his own to share in return. I don't know who that person is, but I have a mental image of a naked guy with no arms and legs, living in a rented poison ivy patch and being forced to read this book."

"It's illegal to kill yourself in a quick and painless way, but if you do it slowly over a few decades -- say by not exercising -- that's called laziness, not suicide, and it's completely legal. You might even get credit for being jolly or get a job as a TV chef on a cable network."

"The only people who serve on juries are people who have nothing better to do. Many of those people have jobs, which means jury duty is more pleasant than their jobs! [...] If my job was less pleasant than jury duty, I'd want to convict innocent people just to see their eyes bulge when they hear the verdict."

"There's a special word for bosses who care about their employees: unemployed. The whole point of being a boss is to get employees to do more work than they want to do and to accept less pay than they deserve. If a boss starts caring about employees, it screws up the whole oppressor-victim dynamic of capitalism."

"People who have children have the best work-avoidance excuses in the world. If you don't have kids, get some immediately. The playgrounds are full of them."

"Express gratitude. Give more than is expected. Speak optimistically. Touch people. Remember names. Don't confuse flexibility with weakness. Don't judge people by their mistakes; rather, judge them by how they respond to their mistakes. Remember that your physical appearance is for the benefit of others. Attend to your own basic needs first; otherwise you will not be useful to anyone else."

"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. This has not proved to be the winning strategy that you might think."

"Our scallops are so delicious your mouth will thank you, which is creepy because your mouth can actually talk."

"Biblical scholars tell us that this is the same meal that Jesus ate at the last supper. But hey, I’m sure you have a good reason for ordering something else."

"Stacey puts a little love in each pasta shell. But it’s self-love, so it won’t help you that much."

"If you don’t believe your salmon is wild, ask it to fetch your newspaper and see what happens."

"This dish might not turn you into a syndicated cartoonist, but whatever you’re doing now probably isn’t working either."

"We use only the finest days of the week in this dish."

"These days it seems like any idiot with a laptop computer can churn out a business book and make a few bucks. That's certainly what I'm hoping. It would be a real letdown if the trend changed before this masterpiece goes to print."

"If not for the compulsion of engineers, mankind would have never seen the wheel, settling instead for the trapezoid because some Neanderthal in Marketing convinced everybody it had great braking power. And there would be no fire, because some middle-manager cave person would point out that if fire was such a good idea the other cave people would already be using it."

"The office is designed for "work," not productivity. Work can be defined as "anything you'd rather not be doing." Productivity is a different matter. Telecommuting substitutes two hours of productivity for ten hours of work."

"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion."

"Contrary to popular belief, it's often your clothing that gets promoted. [...] Always dress better than your peers so your clothes will be the ones selected for promotion. And make sure you're in your clothes when it happens. One man made the mistake of bringing his dry cleaning to work and ended up as a direct report to his own sports jacket."

"A Mission Statement is defined as "a long awkward sentence that demonstrates management's inability to think clearly." All good companies have one. Companies that don't have Mission Statements will often be under the mistaken impression that the objective of the company is to bicker among departments, produce low-quality products, and slowly go out of business."

"You're only as important as your furniture. And that's at peak levels of dignity. [...] If you think about it, you can get fired but your furniture stays behind, gainfully employed at the company that didn't need you anymore."

"It's useless to expect rational behavior from the people you work with, or anybody else for that matter. If you can come to peace with the fact that you're surrounded by idiots, you'll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others."

"Ninety percent of all new business ventures fail. Apparently, ten percent of the time you get lucky, and that's enough to support a modern economy. I'm betting that's what separates us from the animals; animals are lucky only nine percent of the time. I suspect this is true because I play strip poker with my cats and they rarely win. In fact, it's gotten to the point where they run like cowards at the sound of my electric shaver."

"Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect. Conversation reminds us that we are part of a greater whole, connected in some way that transcends duty or bloodline or commerce. Conversation can be many things, but it can never be useless."

"People think they follow advice but they don't. Humans are only capable of receiving information. They create their own advice. If you seek to influence someone, don't waste time giving advice. You can change only what people know, not what they do."

"We like to believe that other people have the same level of urges as we do, despite all evidence to the contrary. We convince ourselves that people differ only in their degree of morality or willpower, or a combination of the two. But urges are real, and they differ wildly for every individual. Morality and willpower are illusions. For any human being, the highest urge always wins and willpower never enters into it."

"It is absurd to define God as omnipotent and then burden him with our own myopic view of the significance of human beings. [...] The concept of 'importance' is a human one born out of our need to make choices for survival. An omnipotent being has no need to rank things. To God, nothing in the universe would be more interesting, more worthy, more useful, more threatening, or more important than anything else."

"Four billion people say they believe in God, but few genuinely believe. If people believed in God, they would live every minute of their lives in support of that belief. Rich people would give their wealth to the needy. Everyone would be frantic to determine which religion was the true one. No one could be comfortable in the thought that they might have picked the wrong religion and blundered into eternal damnation, or bad reincarnation, or some other unthinkable consequence. People would dedicate their lives to converting others to their religions."

"If you're going to create, create a lot. Creativity is not like playing the slot machines, where failure to win means you go home broke. With creativity, if you don't win, you're usually no worse off than if you hadn't played."

"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. The evening news is full of unexpected bad things that happen to other people. Most of it isn't funny, unless it involves exploding whales, ear biting, or pies thrown at billionaires."

"The hardest part of writing humor is finding a topic that hasn't already been used more times than the only back scratcher at the Institute of Very Itchy People. Ideally, you want a situation that makes you smile even before the humor has been added. If you start with a fresh and inherently funny situation, you're halfway home. [...] If a topic makes you gag, or clench your buns, or laugh, or sigh, or retch -- or react physically in any way -- you have a winner."

"For humor to work, it must be original. It's easy to create original humor -- or anything else original -- if you follow my formula. [...] Identify someone who has more creative talent than you do, then try to imitate that person exactly. If you're like me, you can depend on your lack of talent to make your imitation look nothing like the source. Over time, you'll drift even further from the source of your theft, thus becoming "original.""

"Creativity doesn't require much time. But creativity always needs your energy. You can't create if you're pooped or your brain is full of junk. A person who manages creativity makes sure his schedule has lots of free spaces, no matter how many priorities are looming."

"Trying to win an argument with an irrational person is like trying to teach a cat to snorkel by providing written instructions. No matter how clear your instructions, it won't work. Your best strategy is to reduce the time you spend in that sort of situation."

"Unless you work alone, one of the biggest assaults on your happiness is something called a meeting. A meeting is essentially a group of people staring at visual aids until the electrochemical activity in their brains ceases, at which point decisions are made. It's like being in suspended animation, except that people in suspended animation aren't in severe physical discomfort and praying for death."

"Never laugh when you're being sarcastic. It will ruin the effect. If you feel the uncontrollable need to giggle, wait until your boss says something hilarious, such as, "Is this only Wednesday? It feels like Friday already!" Then you can throw back your head, open your mouth like you're about to swallow a live porpoise, and laugh like a naked teenager in a field full of pussy willows. Sincerity like that will make your sarcasm all the more convincing."

"Thinking is easier than working. And the best kind of thinking is the kind where you don't have to write anything down, i.e., "meeting thinking." When you think up an idea during a meeting, all you have to do is blurt it out. You won't have to involve any parts of your body except your mouth and maybe your brain stem."

"What if there are other optical illusions about our existence that are just as major as the illusion of the Sun revolving around the Earth? [...] What are the odds that you live in exactly the window of human existence when all of the major optical illusions have been discovered? Wouldn't that be an amazing coincidence, since every previous generation of humans has believed they were born in that window of time?"

"I predict that news outlets will try to compensate for the loss of relevant news by focusing on stories that are more shocking and depressing than ever. At least that way they'll get your attention and sell advertising even if the stories aren't "news" in the traditional sense."

"Rich guys used to be able to manipulate the stock market and make huge profits at the expense of smaller investors. It was big news when the small investors discovered they'd been screwed. Now there are many safeguards against the small investor ever finding out how much he's getting screwed."

"The first thing that young people need to realize is that the concepts of "career" and "job security" are a bit dated. In the future, most people's jobs will involve scrambling around like frightened chipmunks trying to find the next paycheck in an endless string of unrelated short-term jobs. But since "Frightened Chipmunk" doesn't look very impressive on a business card, people will call themselves entrepreneurs, consultants, and independent contractors."

"Companies form confusopolies to make it impossible for the average Induhvidual to determine who has the lowest price. This way each major company gets a share of the pie, the size of which depends on how skillfully they can dupe customers with advertisements. That will be the primary job of marketing professionals in the future-- disguising the true cost of your product in order to be a successful confusopolist."

"A growing number of workers -- those who are more clever than industrious -- have already discovered the unbridled joy of sitting at home and getting paid for sleeping, eating, masturbating, and watching television. This technique -- sometimes called telecommuting -- has all the financial advantages of being employed with none of the stigma of being a filthy, perverted hobo."