Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.

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

Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.

You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.

There's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.

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.

The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you're certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the only thing you're gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you.

There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives.

Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

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.

Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.

If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?

The only risk of failure is promotion.

Happiness is nothing but good health and freedom, and money is the single best way you can buy your freedom.

I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.

You don't have to be a 'person of influence' to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.

The best things in life are silly.

The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.

Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.

Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart.

Let's form proactive synergy restructuring teams.

I love magazines. It's such McNugget kind of information.

One strategy for getting ahead is being incredibly good at a particular skill; you need to be world-class to stand out for that skill. In my case, I layered fairly average skills together until the combination became special.

'Dilbert' became popular during the downsizing of the '90s, and job security was a major theme of the strip.

In less enlightened times, the best way to impress women was to own a hot car. But women wised up and realized it was better to buy their own hot cars so they wouldn't have to ride around with jerks.

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.

We don't always have an accurate view of our own potential. I think most people who are frightened of public speaking and can't imagine they might feel different as a result of training. Don't assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

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

Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.

If you see voters as rational, you'll be a terrible politician. People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.

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.

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.

If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you may wake up each day with failure in mind because the goal is hard to reach, and you are progressing only by small amounts. It takes up all your willpower. I recommend that instead of a goal, you have a system.

It doesn't take many people to have a bad sense of humor to get in trouble at a corporation.

Many, if not most, career opportunities come to you through people you know. So the more people you know, the more opportunities you have. Improving your social network is a great example of a system for moving from lower odds to better odds without having a specific goal.

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.

I had several different bosses during the early years of 'Dilbert.' They were all pretty sure I was mocking someone else.

If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.

The longer you work here, diverse it gets.

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

Obviously there's not much options when you're a cartoonist - you pretty much either work at home or rent an office I guess, and working at home just seems easier.

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.

Before 'Dilbert,' I tried to become a computer programmer. In the early days of computing, I bought this big, heavy, portable computer for my house. I spent two years nights and weekends trying to write games that I thought I would sell. Turns out I'm not that good a programmer, so that was two years that didn't work out.

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

Psychology is the only necessary skill for running for president. Trump knows psychology.

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.

I'm primarily just an investor.

There are always deadlines I have to meet. I don't let myself get too close to the deadlines, so it's not like I'm just sweating bullets or anything if the clock is ticking. I never let myself get in that situation.

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

The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.

I'm surrendering myself to the realities of the Internet.

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.'

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've always defined myself not as a cartoonist, but as an entrepreneur. That was true before I tried cartooning. I always imagined cartooning would be how I got my seed capital. I always thought my other businesses would be the less dominant part of my life.

One way to compensate for a tiny brain is to pretend to be dead.

Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won't be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps.

We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.

I get mail; therefore I am.

Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.