Scott Adams Quotations

Scott Adams is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. He is also the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary and business. His writing is often satirical and/or sarcastic. Adams frequently speaks about media bias, citing instances (such as the ‘Fine People hoax’) where the media attributes a statement to a public figure but distorts the meaning by omitting a key statement made by that person.

His books include two bestsellers: How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.

Be careful that what you write does not offend anybody or cause problems within the company. The safest approach is to remove all useful information.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Everybody is somebody’s else’s weirdo.

If free will exists, why do the tallest candidates with the best hair usually win elections ?

If your boss gets drunk and offers to photocopy her posterior, do not helpfully suggest pressing reduce 75%.

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.

I’m predicting that we’ll finally have a computer that will search my e-mail automatically and delete every message that begins with ‘thought you’d be interested,’ and then give an electrical shock to the sender to remind him or her to stop sending that kind of message.

I think the pleasure of completed work is what makes blogging so popular. You have to believe most bloggers have few if any actual readers. The writers are in it for other reasons. Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn. All you get is the pleasure of a completed task.

I wish I were dumber so I could be more certain about my opinions. It looks fun.

Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.

Normal people… believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs.

On the fourth day of telecommuting, I realized that clothes are totally unnecessary.

Remember, freedom is always taken, never given.

Science is a good thing. News reporters are good things too. But it’s never a good idea to put them in the same room.

Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel.

Technology will definitely solve all our problems, but in the process it will create brand new ones. But that’s O.K. because the most you can expect from life is to get to solve better and better problems.

The best part about being my age is in knowing how my life worked out. Sure, there’s a lot more living to go, but there isn’t much doubt that I’ll always be the ‘Dilbert guy.’

The best plan now is to have as many bosses as possible. I call it boss diversity. If you work for a company and you have one boss and that boss doesn’t like you or wants to get rid of you, you’re in trouble. But if you work for yourself, you have lots of bosses, who are your customers, and if a few of them decide they don’t like you, that’s okay.

The greenest home is the one you don’t build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family and share a house that’s already built. Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don’t want.

There’s a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone and it’s where most of life happens.

There’s kind of a toll you have to pay with a cat; if you don’t pet her for 10 minutes she’ll bother you for six hours.

There’s no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas. There are only your own ideas and other people’s. If you want someone to like your idea, tell him he said it first last week and you just remembered it.

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.

The source of all unhappiness is other people. As soon as you learn to think of other people as noisy furniture, the sooner you will be happy.

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.