Scott Adams

"We know the goats are imported because they don’t speak English."

"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."

"As you know, the best way to solve a problem is to identify the core belief that causes the problem; then mock that belief until the people who hold it insist that you heard them wrong."

"You might think the word “homemade” is just a word we use as a marketing ploy. But what you don’t realize is that the staff sleeps here at night. If your tablecloth is wrinkled, that’s why."

"If our mushrooms make you hallucinate, please inform us immediately so we can overcharge you."

"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."

"A skilled persuader who understands both social media and the news business can easily stir the pot to create an advantage through chaos."

"The biggest issue in this election is something called flip-flopping, and all candidates are accused of doing it. A strong leader is expected to maintain steadfast resolve in his opinion even if the environment changes or he gets new information. In any other context, that would be considered the first sign of a brain tumor. When presidents do it, it's called leadership, and frankly, we can't get enough of it."

"Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately."

"My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser."

"Named after the great romaine emperor, Julius Salad."

"Our salmon sandwiches are so good you’ll want to swim upstream to our kitchen and spawn. But please don’t."

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

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

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

"Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason."

"Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don't want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does."

"If there is one thing that our role models in this election have taught us, it's that omitting important information is completely different from lying."

"Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn't mean I can't be the first."

"They say that dogs lick their own genitalia because they can. But I think it's at least partially because they don't have the Internet."

"There’s nothing more humbling than seeing your best quotes in a list, and thinking they could have been written by a coma patient with a keyboard and spasms."

"If an economist uses a complicated model to predict just about anything, you can ignore it. By analogy, a doctor can’t tell you the exact date of your death in 50 years. But if a doctor tells you to eat less and exercise more, that’s good advice even if you later get hit by a bus. Along those same lines, economists can give useful general advice on the economy, even if you know there will be surprises. Still, be skeptical."

"If you think it’s easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you’ve probably never tried."

"If you have questions about this salad, give your server the spinach inquisition."

"We smoke the bacon so you don’t have to."

"This sandwich used to include endive, but no one wanted to eat a BELT."

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

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

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

"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."

"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?""

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

"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."

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

"The things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That's persuasion."

"Did my persuasion make any difference? There is no way to tell."

"Trump can invent any reality he wants for the less important topics."

"Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end."

"Life is half delicious yogurt, half crap, and your job is to keep the plastic spoon in the yogurt."

"The world isn't fair, but as long as it's tilting in my direction I find that there's a natural cap to my righteous indignation."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn't ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, "Here's your square hole"? The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I'm saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness."