Laurence J. Peter

Such an extreme policy will not be generally tolerated. So, to avoid the accumulation of incompetents, administrators have evolved the plan of promoting everyone, the incompetent as well as the competent. They find psychological justification for this policy by saying that it spares students the painful experience of failure.

For each individual, for you, for me, the final promotion is from a level of competence to a level of incompetence.

the ability to charm, to amuse, to inflame a crowd of ten thousand voters with voice and gesture did not necessarily carry with it the ability to think sensibly, to debate soberly and to vote wisely on the nation’s business.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

Slump, and the world slumps with you. Push and you push alone.

Aristotle's axiom: The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

A political party now exists primarily as an apparatus for selecting candidates and getting them elected to office.

In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

The obsessive feeling that a person who pushes harder than average deserves to advance farther and faster than average. This feeling, of course, has no scientific basis: it is simply a moralistic delusion

Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

In most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

The only valid rule about the proper length of a statement is that it achieve its purpose effectively.

Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.

Incompetence knows no barriers of time or place.