Quotes from Laurence J. Peter

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.

Old age is when you know all the answers but nobody asks you the questions.

Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.

There's only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

The man who believes he can do it is probably right, and so is the man who believes he can't.

A lawyer is a man who helps you get what is coming to him.

A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.

America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.

Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.

Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.

Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny, and your hour-by-hour mental counduct produces power for change in your life. Develop a train of thought on which to ride. The nobility of your life as well as your happiness depends upon the direction in which that train of thought is going.

There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else.

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

The devil could change. He was once an angel and may be evolving still.

The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.

It's better to have loved and lost than to have to do forty pounds of laundry a week.

Work is done by those [employees] who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.

When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation.

A rut is a grave with the ends knocked out.

Cleaning anything involves making something else dirty, but anything can get dirty without something else getting clean.