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I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. (Jerome K Jerome)

I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. ("Q")

Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress. (Scott McNealy)

If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living. (Dave Barry)

It's this whole gung-ho superorganism thing that I just can't get. I try, but I just don't get it. What is it, I'm supposed to do everything for the colony and...what about my needs? ("Z" aka Woody Allen)

I had to make some optimistic assumptions to meet the revenue target. In week three, we're visited by an alien named D'utox Inag who offers to share his advanced technology. (Scott Adams)

We can dispense with the pleasantries, Commander. I am here to get you back on schedule. ("Darth Vader")

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. (Douglas Adams)

Police-mentality planners design workplaces the way they would prisons: optimized for containment at minimal cost. (Tom DeMarco)

In an information economy, the most valuable company assets drive themselves home every night. If they are not treated well, they do not return the next morning. (Peter Chang)

Cubicles have become such an icon of nasty workplaces that it's shocking that the companies who manufacture them still have the chutzpah to pretend that they're efficient, productive, and pleasant. (Joel Spolsky)

Today's [open plan] office is a wasteland. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort. (Robert Propst)

Arranged row upon row in air-conditioned rooms, waited upon by crisp, young, white-shirted men who move softly among them like priests serving in a shrine, the computers go about their work quietly and, for the most part, unseen by the public. (Time Magazine in 1965)

The gray cubicles that surround your IT staff are high and closed off. The fluorescent lights illuminating the windowless basement space shine harshly on the code-inscribed whiteboards, the only adornments on the dingy walls. Excess hardware, outdated software manuals and tangles of power cords haphazardly reside in the common areas. (Cheryl Asselin in 2004)

Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties. (Doug Larson)

First question in the Management Quiz: Do you believe that anything you don't understand must be easy to do? (Scott Adams)

A product manager can be defined as someone who has all of the responsibility and none of the power. (Guy Kawasaki)

The ablest brains did not climb to the top of the stairs. Seniority and society were the dominant factors in army promotion. Deportment counted a great deal. Brains came a bad fourth. (David Lloyd George)

Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy. (Huey P Long)

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it. (W C Fields)

If at first you do succeed - try to hide your astonishment. (Harry Banks)

One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop. (G M Weilacher)

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. ("Archibald Putt")

ManagementSpeak: Individual Contributor. Translation: Employee who does real work. (Juergen Rudnick)

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you play with them.(Richard Feynman)

Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, "Certainly, I can!". Then get busy and find out how to do it. (Theodore Roosevelt)

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. (A A Milne)

In a world where we are forced to conform to society, it is necessary to have personal chaos. (Thomas Armstong)

In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. (John C Dvorak)

If a company won't trust me to use the Internet effectively, I don't care to work for them. (Mike Gunderloy)

Whenever you hear the phrase "mean and lean", replace it with what it really connotes: failing and frightened. (Tom DeMarco)

We're all working harder and faster. But unless we're having fun the transformation doesn't work. (Jack Welch)

Treating your rocket scientist employees as if they were still in kindergarten is not an isolated phenomenon. Almost every company has some kind of incentive program that is insulting and demeaning. (Joel Spolsky)

We trained hard - but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization. (Gaius Petronius Arbiter)

If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play. (John Cleese)

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure. (Bill Gates)

Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups. (John Kenneth Galbraith)

I'll never understand why someone might pay me to wear a corporate logo. To me, all such shirts read "All my other clothes are dirty" or "Until which time, if ever, I develop a personality of my own, this t-shirt has offered to speak on my behalf". (David Sedaris)

You needed a cool name to put on a T-shirt, and you needed a T-shirt to give to people. It was part of getting people excited enough to work 70 hours a week. (Erich Ringewald of Apple)

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor. (Barry Boehm)

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. (Robert Frost)

An engineer will not be motivated to make a shareholder rich. (Peter Drucker)

The relationship between the CIO and CEO has been that of a trophy wife. (Thomas Davenport)

Men are going to have to learn to be managers in a world where the organization will come close to consisting of all chiefs and one Indian. The Indian, of course, is the computer. (Thomas Whisler)

IT directors would be [the World Cup team from] Russia. They are poorly resourced, will probably underachieve, have an emotionless approach to things and wear bad outfits. (Ian MacDonald)

Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. (Oscar Wilde)

The squeaky wheel may get the most oil, but it is also the first to be replaced. (Marilyn Vos Savant)

All good work is done in defiance of management. (Bob Woodward)

If you notice a lot of attention being given to process improvement, it's a sure sign that all the smart employees have left the company and those who remain are desperately trying to find a "process" that is so simple that the boneheads who remain can handle it. (Scott Adams)

Some folks can look so busy doing nothin' that they seem indispensable. (Kin Hubbard)

To do great work, a man must be very idle as well as very industrious. (Samuel Butler)

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. (Charles Baudelaire)

Malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. (?Victor Hugo)

Your role may be thankless, but if you're willing to give it your all, you might just bring success to those who outlast you. (E L Kersten)

The country is accustomed to having foreign workers come here for unpleasant, low-paying jobs such as fruit picking. Why shouldn't engineering go the same way? (Richard Etter)

Outsourcing most of a company's information technology budget is more like an emetic than a miracle cure. (Paul Strassman in 1995)

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up. (Ogden Nash)

At that time I did not yet know the frightening anaesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hobble, dowse, and dull every leap of intuition and every spark of talent. (Primo Levi)

I don't know what percentage of our time on any computer-based project is spent getting the equipment to work right, but if I had a gardener who spent as much of her time fixing her shovel as we spend fooling with our computers, I'd buy her a good shovel. (Erasmus Smums)

Anyone can make a project fail through sheer luck. Only the savvy know how to do it by design. (Naomi Karten)

If the network idea should prove to do for education what a few have envisioned, surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure. Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network's software to all generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging. (J C R Licklider in 1968)

We each have only enough strength to complete those assignments that we are fully convinced are important. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad. (Fyodor Dostoevski)

Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force. (W Edwards Deming)

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. (A H Weiler)

As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude. (Sigmund Freud)

There is no such thing as group originality or group creativity. (Edwin Land)

If your project doesn't work, look for the part that you didn't think was important. (Arthur Bloch)

Status meetings can become a form of structured harassment. (Patrick Bailey)

In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life. (Bill Gates)

---

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

(Lewis Carroll)