Laurence J. Peter

Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990) was a Canadian writer and professor. He is most well known for formulating the "Peter principle," which posits that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence."


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

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?

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

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

In every organization there is a considerable accumulation of dead wood in the executive level.

Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence.

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

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.