All Quotes

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Years later, when "Dilbert" was in thousands of newspapers, people often asked me if I ever imagined being so lucky. I usually said no, because that's the answer people expected. The truth is that I imagined every bit of good fortune that has come my way. But in my imagination I also invented a belt that would allow me to fly and had special permission from Congress to urinate like a bird wherever I wanted. I wake up every morning disappointed that I have to wear pants and walk. Imagination has a way of breeding disappointment."

"But history has turned on a few people—like the Founding Fathers and Jesus Christ come to mind—who used the same tricks: They describe to people a better vision of themselves. And Trump fits into that [model] in the most direct way you could possibly do. He’s saying, "You're an American, I'm going to make you feel great"."

"I am saying: I see a flame thrower. I think the flame thrower guy wins in the stick fight."

"When you understand persuasion ... the truth is not as useful as it should be ..."

"I think New Yorkers are more provocative in every way."

"When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options [...] 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him."

"If one more person hallucinates to me about some "program" where teens are kidnapped and "fixed" and returned to their happy parents, I might explode. No such thing exists. You have two options. Only two. No help is coming. Only death and suffering."

"If I were to invent a solution to the dangerous young man problem, I think it would involve putting them all in one place so they could only hurt each other, not necessarily in jail, just away from society. Once they are separated from society (and drugs) maybe help is possible."

"Political differences are mostly a matter of what frightens you the most, with a thin frosting of rationalization on top."

"If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people—according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll—that's a hate group. I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this. This can't be fixed."

"You should absolutely be racist whenever it's to your advantage. Every one of you should be open to making a racist personal career decision."

"Most of my income will be gone by next week [...] My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can't come back from this, am I right? There's no way you can come back from this."

"In a way I think [Trump] may have brought it on himself. His very first statement about Hillary Clinton should be in jail. I feel like when he started talking real jail then politics changed. And [the Democrats] said "If you're going to talk real jail for us, we're actually going to put you in jail." And it looks like that's what's happening."

"Every single one of our large entities, we've seen, is corrupt. From the FBI to the DOJ. I'm not talking about every person, but at least leadership elements. We've seen that our congress can be corrupt. We've seen that the CDC, basically everybody's corrupt once you find out what's really going on. The exception, we're told, is all 50 separate elections for a national election, all 50... All 50 of them are all good, but everything else is corrupt? But not those 50 things?"

"[About the 2024 US presidential election:] It feels like not an election to find your best guy, or woman. [...] It screams two sides trying to stay out of jail."

"There is no such thing as as news about public figures that's true."

"The way that most political hoaxes are done is that the person who gets cancelled did a real thing, lets say it's on video or they wrote it in this email, but nobody can imagine how that could be out of context. [...] You look at it and you go 'You know, I don't know the whole story, but how in the world could I be wrong about this? I'm looking right at it. It's really clear.' And that's how the trick is done, because there are ways to manipulate it to its actual opposite."

"If your job is to look for that stuff, any offense, well you're gonna find it because that's your job. And the more you find, the more you're worth I guess, because you found a lot of it."

"If you could reframe race relations, that would be the biggest win in America. And so here's my reframe: Every time somebody says 'The average of this group is not doing as well as the average of this group', they're fucking you. They are not your friend."

"I could not have been luckier. I have the luckiest cancellation of anybody who's ever been cancelled. [...] It just couldn't have been better. It just absolutely could not have been better."

"Every calamity has its bard, and downsizing's is Scott Adams."

"Scott Adams is a very, very funny guy who writes a brilliantly perceptive comic strip."

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

"Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them? But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect."

"A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb."

"If we focus our attention on the next twenty-five years we may say that development is likely to reach some point intermediate between the first bomb detonated over Hiroshima and processes which once initiated might put an end to all life on earth. Just what intermediate point will be reached within twenty-five years no one can tell."

"I'm looking for a market for wisdom."

"A scientist's aim in a discussion with his colleagues is not to persuade, but to clarify."

"The most important step in getting a job done is the recognition of the problem. Once I recognize a problem I usually can think of someone who can work it out better than I could."

"In order to succeed it is not necessary to be much cleverer than other people. All you have to do is be one day ahead of them."

"It is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. As long as there is a margin of hope, however narrow, we have no choice but to base all our actions on that margin. America and Russia have one interest in common which may override all their other interests: to be able to live with the bomb without getting into an all-out war that neither of them wants."

"In life you must often choose between getting a job done or getting credit for it. In science, the most important thing is not the ideas you have but the decision which ones you choose to pursue. If you have an idea and are not doing anything with it, why spoil someone else's fun by publishing it?"

"Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most."

"All we had to do was lean back, turn a switch and watch a screen of a television tube. If flashes of light appeared on the screen it would mean that liberation of atomic energy would take place in our lifetime. We turned the switch, saw the flashes — we watched for about five minutes — then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for trouble."