Scott Adams

“Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.”

“Let's form proactive synergy restructuring teams.”

“When you hire that first person, then you're a boss. You've got performance reviews. You've got complaints about not making enough money. You've got people who are just going to sell your story to the tabloids.”

“For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.”

“I have a perverse attraction to risk. Not physical risk but emotional, financial risk - anything than can't kill you immediately.”

“Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.”

“I would sometimes sit in a crowded restaurant, and say, 'You know, I'm the only person in this restaurant who can't draw.'”

“Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.”

“I have an endless stream of suggestions coming in from readers who are in cubicles. That keeps me going.”

“By the early-afternoon hours, if your brain is normal, it's running strictly on inertia and reflex. All you can do during those hours are the things that are exactly like other things you've done in similar situations. Creativity is out of the question. You might argue that you don't notice any difference in your thinking during the afternoon. That's because you're too dazed to notice anything during those hours. I'm sure it's true for me; I believe you could set my eyebrows on fire during the afternoon and I wouldn't notice until sometime the next morning.”

“I try to manage my day by my circadian rhythms because the creativity is such an elusive thing, and I could easily just stomp over it doing my administrative stuff.”

“Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching. -- Dogbert's Motto”

“When times are bad, the gloves come off and employers are less nice. People become disposable.”

“If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it. You can't control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck to find you. The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game.”

“I don't get embarrassed by the same things that other people do. I would say that probably the biggest thing that holds people back is, 'If I do this, I'm going to look like an idiot if it doesn't work out.'”

“The first time you see something that you have never seen before, you almost always know right away if you should eat it or run away from it.”

“Never use naughtiness in mixed company, unless your witticism is so funny that your audience will shoot tears of happiness out of their eyes with a velocity sufficient to powerwash a small bus. Any joke that falls short of that standard will make you lose respect in the eyes of everyone except your best friends, who, as you know, lost respect for you long ago.”

“You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.”

“If a job's worth doing, it's too hard.”

“I've tried lots of things. The reality is, I'm excited by everything on Day 1. And if by Day X things aren't working the way I hoped, I lose my passion. I have not seen the correlation between my passion and my success.”