Scott Adams

"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 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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 goal of change management is to dupe slow-witted employees into thinking change is good for them by appealing to their sense of adventure and love of challenge. This is like convincing a trout to leap out of a stream to experience the adventure of getting deboned."

"The most important skill for any leader is the ability to take credit for things that happen on their own."

"I have a saying: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.""

"As a manager you could do a lot of thinking, experimenting, and continuous training. Or you can just do what everyone else does and blindly follow my directions like an unthinking zombie. Blind obedience is easier than the alternatives and the pay's the same. In fact, the pay is better, if you look at it from an hourly perspective."

"Always "lead by example." Let's say you're trying to reduce costs in the company. You can set an example by ordering your chauffeur to get his hair cut at Super Cuts. This is the kind of personal sacrifice that inspires the employees. Soon you'll be able to squeeze their health benefits like a tourniquet on a seedless grape."

"When we are born, all humans are clueless, self-absorbed, and helpless. Most babies will grow out of it. Those who don't become managers."

"When you have an exceptionally nasty project, present it to your employee as a "challenge." That seemingly minor change in syntax will cause the employee to feel like an Olympic athlete instead of the boot-stomped carpet mite that he is."

"Rumors are an excellent way to keep your employees nervous and edgy, which is similar to being alert. Actually, it's better. When they're alert they realize what you're doing to them and they resist. But when they're edgy they work like crazed bumblebees and die of stress before they become cynical. In other words, everyone wins."

"The most efficient way to implement an empowerment program is to have meetings where you punish people for the decisions they made while at the same time encouraging people in the group to think for themselves. Eventually, the employees become numb, thus developing a healthy tolerance to the hopelessness of their situation. Hopelessness isn't the same as happiness, but it's enough to make the employees stop complaining, and that's a good start."

"People don't change their basic nature, they just accumulate more stuff upon which they can apply their stupidity, selfishness, and horniness. From this perspective, the future isn't hard to predict."

"Technology magnifies the ability of one person to have a big impact on other people. If that doesn't scare you, then the next time you see professional wrestling on television, look at the crowd shots and ask yourself if you'd like those people to have a bigger impact on your life."

"Of all the things that influence elections, it appears that information is the least significant. Elections are won by the candidate whose staff members are the most skilled at manipulating the voters. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because you have to be quite smart to figure out the best way to manipulate millions of Induhviduals into marching in the same direction."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."