Author quotes

Discover inspiring words from your favorite authors. Quotes on life, love, and success by renowned writers. Delve into the minds of literary geniuses.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart.

- Mark Twain

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

- John Steinbeck

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

- Laurence J. Peter

He must examine his objectives and see that true progress is achieved through moving forward to a better way of life, rather than upward to total life incompetence.

- Laurence J. Peter

Good followers do not become good leaders.

- Laurence J. Peter

As individuals we tend to climb to our levels of incompetence. We behave as though up is better and more is better, and yet all around us we see the tragic victims of this mindless escalation.

- Laurence J. Peter

Speak when you are angry--and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.

- Laurence J. Peter

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.

- Camille Paglia

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

- Laurence J. Peter

You don't need to take a persons advice to make him feel good, just ask him for it.

- Laurence J. Peter

There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

- Laurence J. Peter

The problem with temptation is that you may not get another chance.

- Laurence J. Peter

The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.

- Laurence J. Peter

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

- Laurence J. Peter

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

- Laurence J. Peter

Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.

- Laurence J. Peter

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

- Laurence J. Peter

An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to.

- Laurence J. Peter

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

- Laurence J. Peter

A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know.

- Laurence J. Peter

Rule of art: Can't kills creativity!

- Camille Paglia

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.

- Camille Paglia

Pornography is art, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Its glut and glitter are a Babylonian excess.

- Camille Paglia

Old school feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman's cosmic sexual power.

- Camille Paglia

My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them.

- Camille Paglia

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

- Camille Paglia

My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma.

- Camille Paglia

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.

- Camille Paglia

Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess.

- Camille Paglia

Men are looking for maternal solace in women, and that's the nature of heterosexuality. Now you tell me, who really has all the power?

- Camille Paglia