All Quotes

"Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false."

"Darwinian evolution may be the most truthful and powerful idea ever generated by Western Science, but if we continue to illustrate our conviction with an indefensible, unsupported, entirely speculative, and basically rather silly story, then we are clothing a thing of beauty in rags - and we should be ashamed, "for the apparel oft proclaims the man.""

"Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates."

"Many similarities of basic design among animal phyla, once so confidently attributed to convergence, and viewed as testimony to the power of natural selection to craft exquisite adaptation, demand the opposite interpretation that Mayr labeled as inconceivable: the similar features are homologies, or products of the same genes, inherited from a common ancestor and never altered enough by subsequent evolution to erase their comparable structure and function. The similarities record the constraining power of conserved history, not the architectural skills of natural selection independently pursuing an optimal design in separate lineages. Vertebrates are, in a certain sense, true brothers (or homologs) - not mere analogs - of worms and insects."

"Arthropods and vertebrates share some broad features of general organization - elongated, bilaterally symmetrical bodies, with sensory organs up front, excretory structures in the back, and some form of segmentation along the major axis. But the geometry of major internal organs could hardly be more different... Arthropods concentrate their nervous system on their ventral (belly) side as two major cords running along the bottom surface of the animal. The mouth also opens on the ventral side, with the esophagus passing between the two nerve cords, and the stomach and remainder of the digestive tube running along the body above the nerve cords. In vertebrates, and with maximal contrast, the central nervous system runs along the dorsal (top) surface as a single tube culminating in a bulbous brain at the front end. The entire digestive system then runs along the body axis below the nerve cord."

"The inversion theory has a long and fascinating history in the discussion of vertebrate origins. The founding version dates to the early nineteenth century and became the centerpiece of a movement often called "transcendental biology," and centered on the attempt to reduce organic diversity to one or a very few archetypal building blocks that could generate all actual anatomies as products of rational laws of transformation. Some of Europe's greatest thinkers participated in this grand, if flawed enterprise. Goethe, Germany's preeminent poet-scientist, tried to explain the varied parts of plants as different manifestations of an archetypal leaf."

"In France, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire attempted to portray the skeleton of vertebrates as a set of modifications upon an archetypal vertebra. In the 1820's, Geoffroy extended his ambitious plan to include annelids and arthropods under that same rubric. ...Vertebrates support their soft parts with an internal skeleton, but insects must live within their vertebrae (a reality, not a metaphor, for Geoffroy). This comparison led to... the claim that a vertebrate rib must represent the same organ as an arthropod leg - and that insects must therefore walk on their own ribs!"

"Geoffrey also recognized that the opposite orientations of gut and nervous system posed a problem for his claim that insects and vertebrates represent different versions of the same archetypal animal - and he proposed the first account of the inversion theory to resolve this threat to unification. ...Geoffroy pursued the... aim of establishing a "unity of type" that could generate both arthropods and vertebrates from the same basic blueprint. ...The single grand design includes a gut in the middle and the main nerve cords somewhere on the periphery."

"Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually turned over to become the first vertebrates (for the classical statement of the inversion theory, see William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, 1920)."

"Gaskell could not abide this indecorous version of his beloved linear progress theory. He could not bear to imagine that the grand procession from jellyfish to man, orchestrated by an ever-increasing mass of nervous tissue, once paused in its stately and orderly march toward human consciousness in order to execute a fancy little flip, a clever jig of inversion, just at the sublime and definitive moment of entrance into the vertebral home stretch."

"Gaskell... had to keep his stately soldiers upright and uniformly oriented... by crafting the brain and spinal cord from an arthropod digestive tube, while forming a completely new gut below. ...Gaskell thought that his move would rescue the theory of linear progress, with its necessary transition of arthropod into vertebrate, from the absurdities of the old inversion theory."

"[Waiting at the bus stop; also his first lines] I-I was told that if I was late again, I would be summarily dismissed..."

"I'm going to need those TPS reports... ASAP..."

"(repeated lines including variants) Hello, Peter. What's happenin'?"

"(to Michael, when the two of them are drinking at a bar) We don't have a lot of time on this Earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way! Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements!"

"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be."

"(after Michael's computer virus has taken $300,000 over the weekend, and the trio try to absolve themselves) I can't believe what a bunch of nerds we are. We're looking up "money laundering" in a dictionary."

"(after asking Peter to come in and work on Saturday) Ah, ah, I almost forgot... I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too. We, uhhh, lost some people this week and we sorta need to play catch-up. Thaaaaaanks."

"[After Peter tells him to turn his radio down] I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven, I told Bill that if Sandra is going to listen to her headphones while she's filing then I should be able to listen to the radio while I'm collating so I don't see why I should have to turn down the radio because I enjoy listening at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven."

"[Talking to Peter on the phone] And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire..."

"I could set the building on fire..."

"I believe you have my stapler..."

"[on holiday in Mexico, having taken the traveller's cheques from Initech before burning the place down, also absolving Peter] Excuse me? Excuse me, senor? May I speak to you please? I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a pina colada, and I said no salt, NO salt for the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass..."

"And yes, I won't be leaving a tip, 'cause I could... I could shut this whole resort down. Sir? I'll take my traveler's checks to a competing resort. I could write a letter to your board of tourism and I could have this place condemned. I could put... I could put... strychnine in the guacamole. There was salt on the glass, BIG grains of salt."

"Cockgobblers!"

"There was nothing wrong with it [his name]... until I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys."

"PC LOAD LETTER? What the fuck does that mean?"

"[Regarding the malfunctioning fax/copy machine] That thing's lucky I'm not armed."

"What would ya say... ya do here?"

"Yes, I am also not a pussy."

"[first lines, when he is in his car, driving to work and stuck in the traffic jam with Peter and Michael] Mother shitter, son of an ass! You, I just!"

"[drunk singing] Back up in your ass with the resurrection."

"[frustrated with the malfunctioning printer] Why does it say "Paper Jam" when there is no paper jam?!"

"[Repeated line] Fuckin' A!"

"[When asked by Peter if anybody has ever said "Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays"] No. No, man. Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' something like that, man."

"[When Peter prepares to confess to stealing from his company, which will mean certain jail time.] Hey, Peter...watch your cornhole, bud."

"Work Sucks"

"Yeeeeaaaahh, I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday..."

"Ron Livingston - Peter Gibbons"

"Jennifer Aniston - Joanna"

"David Herman - Michael Bolton"

"Ajay Naidu - Samir Nagheenanajar"

"Diedrich Bader - Lawrence"

"Brian Carlos - Vincent Porter"

"Jon Schroeder - Ernest Porter"

"Stephen Root - Milton Waddams"

"Gary Cole - Bill Lumbergh"

"Richard Riehle - Tom Smykowski"

"Alexandra Wentworth - Anne"

"Joe Bays - Dom Portwood"