Jean Shepherd Quotes

An office party is not, as is sometimes supposed, the Managing Director's chance to kiss the tea-girl. It is the tea-girl's chance to kiss the Managing Director (however bizarre an ambition this may seem to anyone who has seen the Managing Director face on).

Sometimes, if you wear suits for too long, it changes your ideology.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.

In the eighties, we had the ladies who lunch, the power lunch - everything was power. At the beginning of the nineties, things changed.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

You know our nation. If a citizen officer of one town has just one more silver button on his epaulette than another, great hue and cry arises and the important cause goes by the board …

There are certain people you're allowed to pick apart and certain people you're not.

Nobody likes a smart alec. Which is why it's always better for your career to be wrong and in company rather than right and on your own.

I had friends who were jocks or whatever... Then, around 12 or 13, kids get cliquish and cruel, and that disgusted me. It seemed a reprehensible use of one's arbitrary social status. So I got really aggressive about it and became more of a weird kid.

I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.

People think, 'Well, because you're at Google, you can work from anywhere.' Yes, you can work from anywhere, but many just commute to offices... Working from the office is really important.

I understand that bureaucracy, hierarchy and managing politics is not easy.

Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it's damn good for you.

The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

Some in management positions operate as if they are in a tree of monkeys. They make sure that everyone at the top of the tree looking down sees only smiles. But all too often, those at the bottom looking up see only asses.

What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan.

The recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.

In every work environment, there will be politics. If you really want to rise to the top, you need to figure out what those politics in your workplace are. Then, you hook it in. You decide what conforms and what does not conform to your personal code.

Men who could willingly resign the luxuries and sensual pleasures of a large fortune cannot consent to live without the grandeur and the homage.

For a beggar to live at court is not so much as the King to dwell with him in his cottage.

The most dangerous lechers and creeps are not drunks wearing rags on the street, but respectable men wearing hairspray, pinstripes, and wedding rings who lurk in the halls of power.

When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, "the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery'," and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of "the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.