Great Throughts Treasury

"Weaselmath ? Replacing small numbers with large numbers. If you were the proprietor of the Pocket Lint Museum in California, and you wanted to tout your popularity, you wouldn't say, "Visited by over three people per year and they only stopped to ask directions!" You would replace the small number three with the much larger number 12 million, as in "Located in a state with over 12 million tourist visits per year!" The beauty of weasel-math is that relevancy isn't important."

"Weasels are from Venus ? I realize that everything I say about women in this section is a gross generalization, unfair, untrue, and the result of my poor perception. In other words, it's just like everything I say. Later in the book I will say bad things about men to even up things. That said... There are two types of women: the ones who are currently in discomfort, and the ones who are actively seeking it. That's why women are more effective weasels than men ? because woman get some sort of bizarre enjoyment out of feeling bad. In the first group, the women currently in discomfort, the most popular causes include childbirth, menstrual cramps, headaches, men and wearing bad shoes. In the second, the voluntary pain seekers, we have the women who feel fine but are planning to watch sad movies, imagine bad things that don't exist, pick fights with men over things the men didn't mean to say, and shop for uncomfortable shoes... Men are comfort seekers and discomfort avoiders. I think I speak for most men when I say we only enjoy pain when it happens to other people, also known as entertainment... Women know how to inject pain into any situation. If a man has no reason to fight with a woman, she will sense the void and talk nonstop until some sort of pain is generated. For example, a man might begin to doze off or attempt to change the subject. That's proof that he doesn't care about the woman, and its ground for a fight. When you combine the natural pickiness of women with their ability to endure pain, you have a formula for total domination."

"Well, actually there are kind of two reasons, depending on who asks. You know, when the Girl Scouts asked me, as they actually did, I told them it was a metaphor for his inability to control his environment. For you guys, I'd just say he's glad to see you."

"Well, I don`t think rocks would be very interesting to God," I said. "They just sit on the ground and erode." "You think that way because you are unable to see the storm of activity at the rock`s molecular level or the level beneath that, and so on. And you are limited by your perception of time. If you watched a rock your entire life it would never look different. But if you were God and could observe the rock over fifteen billion years as though only a second had passed, the rock would be frantic with activity. It would be shrinking and growing and trading matter with its environment. Its molecules would travel the universe and become a partner to amazing things that we could never imagine. By contrast, the odd collection of molecules that make a human being will stay in that arrangement for less time than it takes the universe to blink."

"Weasel Words ? Weasel words are words that are true without being informative. They are useful in situations where a clear explanation would be embarrassing."

"Weaseliest Professions ? I'd be great at any profession where it's hard to verify whether you are a maverick visionary or a stinkin' weasel. For example, I think I could be a famous physicist, as long as I stuck to theory and didn't try to detonate any bombs... Every few months I would write a paper full of things that were so smart-sounding that my readers would be forced to assume the confusion was originating in their own brains... Then I'd say, "If that doesn't make sense, maybe you should have paid more attention in school.""

"Well, it wouldn't be Friday if I didn't see Alice wearing her one pair of tan pants... I love the 'Business Casual' look for the way it combines unattractive with unprofessional while diminishing neither."

"We're waiting for Ted, then we can head to the restaurant." "While we're waiting, I'll return a few calls." "Let's go! Hey, where's Wally? "I'll be in the ladies room." "Where's Alice?" "...The chain reaction has begun. Why can't we do this simple thing?""

"What does it mean to be yourself? he asked. If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you?re doing that already. If it means to act like you?re exempt from society?s influence, that?s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ?be yourself? is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave."

"We're just looking at commercial and industrial land in transitional areas."

"We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants."

"What does it mean to feel something similar to the way God feels? Is that like saying a pebble is similar to the sun because both are round? he responded. Maybe God designed our brains to feel love the same way he feels it. He could do that if he wanted to."

"When I first started hearing these stories I was puzzled, but after careful analysis I have developed a sophisticated theory to explain the existence of this bizarre workplace behavior: People are idiots. Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with the low SAT scores. The only difference is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing 24-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..."

"When I was a kid, my grandmother convinced me that brown eggs were tastier. Now I just wonder what route they took through the hen."

"What message does a company send when it huddles its managers together for several days to produce a Mission Statement that sounds like this: "We design integrated world-class olutions on a worldwide basis.""

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

"When virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed."

"When did ignorance become a point of view?"

"When life gives you lemons... choke on them and die... you stupid lemon eater."

"When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality."

"When the belief not control your most important decisions is not belief in the underlying reality, but in the utility believes"

"Which is better, Paris or Rome? ...Which is better, Prague or Budapest?" "Why does it matter which is better? What're you doing?" "I have to RSVP to my millennium parties.""

"Who died and made you the Dalai Lama?"

"Why aren't you signed up for the 401K? I'd never be able to run that far"

"Why do beards stop at the neck? I spend a lot of time wondering that."

"Why do the worst ideas always have the noblest sounding reasons?"

"Why is the news the same as the mini-series that was just on? What are the odds of that?"

"When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world."

"When you have a thought, it is coupled with a physical change in your mind that is specific to that thought, and it has an instant gravitational ripple effect throughout the entire universe."

"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."

"When you do good things, good things come back to you."

"Withholding Information ? As a weasel boss, you want your employees to believe that you have no useful information whatsoever... Communicating with your employees is like being a frightened chunk of marble in a room full of sculptors. They'll try to chip away at everything you say until by process of elimination they figure out the truth."

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

"Women believe that men are, in a sense, defective versions of women, Men believe that women are defective versions of men. Both genders are trapped in a delusion that their personal viewpoints are universal. That viewpoint?that each gender is a defective version of the other?is the root of all misunderstandings."

"Women define themselves by their relationships and men define themselves by whom they are helping. Women believe value is created by sacrifice. If you are willing to give up your favorite activities to be with her, she will trust you. If being with her is too easy for you, she will not trust you."

"Work is like the rest of life. The best parts are free."

"Wow. When you do that with your arms, it creates the illusion that you're thinking."

"Wrong' is one of those concepts that depends on witnesses."

"You can change only what people know, not what they do."

"You can hose it down and never have to worry about it."

"You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public."

"You can't accommodate a hundred different opinions, and you can't ignore them. All you can do is provide people with the illusion that they participated in the decision. For some reason, that's enough to make people happy. This is the basis for all democracies."

"You can't put babies to work on an assembly line!" "These are not babies. They are toddlers.""

"You do whatever you want. Me ? I'm cashing out." "You plan to retire?" "Retire? From what? I don't do anything now except surf the net - why should I pay for that? Besides, I really like the coffee here.""

"You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."

"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."

"Years later, when "Dilbert" was in thousands of newspapers, people often asked me if I ever imagined being so lucky. I usually said no, because that's the answer people expected. The truth is that I imagined every bit of good fortune that has come my way. But in my imagination I also invented a belt that would allow me to fly and had special permission from Congress to urinate like a bird wherever I wanted. I wake up every morning disappointed that I have to wear pants and walk. Imagination has a way of breeding disappointment."

"You haven?t achieved equality until you?re a legitimate target for humor."

"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."

"You know the rules: he who complains is assigned to fix it."