Funny work quotes and insults about jobs

As well as funny quotes about work itself, we’ve got an array of insults lobbed at the jobs that seem to attract more than their fair share of jeers, jokes and jibes.

Sourced from throughout history, from the clay tablets of antiquity to the iPads of today, this collection is the perfect way to waste time when you should be working.

Labouring the point: What is this thing called work?

Let’s start with some snarky and sarcastic quotes about the nature of work and how to handle it.

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

Jerome K. Jerome

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Oscar Wilde

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?

Edgar Bergen

Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.

Drew Carey

Take stuff from work.
And goof off on company time.
I wrote this at work.
They’re paying me to write about stuff I steal from them.
Life is good.

King Missile in Take Stuff from Work

Working hypothesis: the science of work

These funny work quotes suggest that great minds have spent much time analysing work. Probably because that beats actually working.

The Peter Principle: Every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence … Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

Laurence J. Peter

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

C. Northcote Parkinson

Hofstadter’s Law: Things always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Douglas Hofstadter

The Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.

Anon

Meskimen’s Law: There’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.

Anon

Benchley’s Principle: Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he’s supposed to be doing at that moment.

Robert Benchley

McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

Douglas Coupland

Office life: funny quotes about the white collar workplace

For many people, the office is where work happens. Occasionally.

If you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, look at any office at quitting time.

Robert Townsend

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.

Charles Lamb

My office hours are twelve to one with an hour off for lunch.

George Kaufman

What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.

Phyllis Diller

Leadership lessons: Knocking the bosses

Good leadership means good jobs. Luckily for connoisseurs of funny work quotes, good leadership is a good deal rarer than bad. 

The salary of a chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.

J.K. Galbraith

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?”

Don Marquis

Dogbert: Leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.

Scott Adams in Dilbert

This pizza party should’ve been a pay rise
This thank you card should’ve been a pay rise
This rebrand could’ve been a pay rise
This pay rise could’ve kept up with inflation
These hollow gestures could have happened years ago.

Housewitches in Toilets for Everyone

Networking: Pithy posts from the internet

The internet is a rich source of funny work quotes, mainly because people spend so much time posting shit when they should be working.

This meeting could have been a pajama party.

Maddy @MadHatterMommy

Quick question:
Is it “for fucks sake” or “for fuck sake” ?
It’s for a work email so has to sound professional.

Graham @Tachyon100

Don’t you just hate it when you arrive at work and realise you’ve forgotten to bring your will to live?

Fickle Filly @Fickle_Filly

The early bird gets to cry a bit longer in the work parking lot.

Jay @theshamingofjay

When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of growing up to satisfy user needs in a way that meets business goals for transformative outcomes.

Chappell Ellison @ChappellTracker

Pro-tip for couples suddenly working from home together: Get yourselves an imaginary coworker to blame things on. In our apartment, Cheryl keeps leaving her dirty cups all over the place and we really don’t know what to do about her.

Molly Tolsky @mollytolsky

Stages of working from home:
– Yay I get to work from home
– It would be nice to talk to people
– I hope that pigeon sits in the window today

Mark Agee @MarkAgee

HR says I have to stop switching people’s vapes with kazoos.

D.N. Schmidt @Writepop

I told a joke to my boss and he must have found it really funny because now I get to tell it to HR.

Jessie @mommaessiec

Two incomes is better than one. So make sure your partner has two jobs. Follow me for more financial freedom advice.

JohnMtz @johnmtzz

Interviewer: What’s your biggest weakness?
Me: Honesty.
Interviewer: I don’t think honesty is a weakness.
Me: I don’t give a fuck you you think.

Me. I really said that in an interview.
In my dreams. 

This meeting could have been an email

But it’s not. It’s a meeting. And there you are, in the meeting. 

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’

Dave Barry

Meetings are places where dead ideas rise from their graves and eat the brains of the living.

Dave Barry

Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.

J. K. Galbraith

Work history: Insults about jobs from the ancient world 

Insults about jobs are as old as recorded history. Here are some funny work quotes from antiquity.

You should not work using only your eyes; you will not multiply your possessions using only your mouth.

Instructions of Shuruppak, Sumarian c. 2600–2500 BC

Girnishag: You dolt, numskull, school pest, you illiterate, you Sumerian ignoramus, your hand is terrible; it cannot even hold the stylus properly; And yet you say you are a scribe like me.
Enkimansi: What do you mean I am not a scribe like you? When you write a document it makes no sense. When you write a letter it is illegible. You are one of the most incompetent of tablet writers. What are you fit for, can anyone say?
Girnishag: Why, I am competent all around but you are the laziest of scribes, the most careless of men. When you do multiplication, it is full of mistakes. In computing areas, you confuse length and width. You chatterbox, scoundrel, sneerer, and bully.

The Disputation between Enkmansi and Girnishag, Sumarian c. 2500–2000 BC

The potter is covered with earth, although his lifetime is still among the living. To bake his cooking vessels, he burrows in the field more than swine.

Dua-Khety in the Satire of the Trades, Egyptian, c. 2000–1800 BC

Fingers like crocodile claws, stench worse than fish eggs.

Dua-Khety on metalworkers

His strength vanishes through the fatigue and stiffness of kneading all his excrement. He eats bread with his fingers, although he washes himself but once a day.

Dua-Khety on the bricklayer

You’re an informer and a muckraker, a con-man, a gigolo and an educator in evil. All that, Vacerra, and still you’re broke.

Martial, Roman, 40–103 AD

The professions: Insults about white collar work

George Bernard Shaw said that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. Certainly distrust and denigration are occupational hazards. It seems the better a job is rewarded, the more insults have been recorded.

We also have whole collections devoted to those who work in politics, music, the theatre and movies and TV.

Lawyers, the courts, law enforcement and other miscreants

This case file of funny work quotes is devoted to those who argue, adjudicate and enforce the law.

Lawyer: One who protects us from robbery by taking away the temptation.

H.L. Mencken

Judge Willis: What do you suppose I am on the Bench for, Mr Smith?
F. E. Smith: It is not for me to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.

F. E. Smith

I don’t like people who take drugs. Customs officers, for example.

Mick Miller

The Metropolitan Police Force is abbreviated to the MET to give more members a chance of spelling it.

Mike Barfield

Doctors and other quacks

Despite or perhaps because of the fact our lives are often in their hands, it’s not hard to find insults about those who work in medicine. 

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Voltaire

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.

Voltaire

A doctor’s reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

George Bernard Shaw

Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?

George Carlin

Homeopath, noun. The humorist of the medical profession.

Ambrose Bierce

Psychologists and other pyschos

Here are some funny quotes from people who don’t shrink from mocking shrinks.

Psychoanalysis is the disease it purports to cure.

Karl Kraus

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parent’s shortcomings.

Laurence J. Peter

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

Jerome Lawrence

Architects and architecture

Architects have built many things, but an unimpeachable reputation isn’t one of them, if these funny quotes about their work are anything to go by.

Architect, noun. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.

Ambrose Bierce

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.

Nancy Banks-Smith

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Architect Philip Johnson

Less is a bore.

Architect Robert Venturi dismisses the modernist dictum “Less is more.”

The edifice complex.

Deyan Sudjic on architecture as monument to the client

Teachers

The way the teaching profession attracts insults makes you wonder if it’s the educators who need to be taught a lesson.

My problems all started with my early education. I went to a school for mentally disturbed teachers.

Woody Allen

I went to a girls’ school and it made me so stupid that I could barely remember how to breathe.

India Knight

In our school you were searched for guns and knives on the way in and if you didn’t have any, they gave you some.

Emo Philips

Those can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

George Bernard Shaw

Academics and academia

Here are some funny work quotes from people who have a low opinion of those in higher education. 

Those can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, lecture in the sociology of education degrees.

Nicholas Butler

The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

J. Frank Dobie

Sociology is the study of people who do not need to be studied by people who do.

E.S. Turner

It is not even wrong.

Wolfgang Pauli on a scientific paper

Economists

The inability of economics to make testable predictions suggests Thomas Carlyle was half right when he called it the dismal science. Dismal yes, science, no. 

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

Laurence J. Peter

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.

Alfred Knopf

Economics is the only field in which two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying exactly the opposite thing.

Roberto Alazar

Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, “On the one hand,…but on the other.”.

Harry Truman

Historians

The past is a foreign country, and those who toil there are a bit funny too, if these quotes about their work are anything to go by.

History does not repeat itself. Historians repeat one another.

Max Beerbohm

He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.

Sydney Smith on historian Thomas Babington Macaulay

Many things do not happen as they ought. Most things do not happen at all. It is for the conscientious historian to correct these defects.

Mark Twain on the Herodotus approach to history

The military

Here we have some fighting words fired in the direction of the armed forces.

Army, noun. A class of non-producers who defend the nation by devouring everything likely to tempt an enemy.

Ambrose Bierce

The scum of the earth.

The Duke of Wellington on his army

Lions led by donkeys.

Max Hoffmann on the British army

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Groucho Marx

Journalists

The plethora of insults about jobs in journalism show that the fourth estate is not everyone’s first choice as the world’s most trusted profession.

Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.

Journalist Jeffrey Bernard

A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard wrote: “A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.” Imagine being the same, only writing about coffee tables.

Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur on style journalism

Words to go with pictures of people wearing clothes written by boarding-school girls with misspelt first names (so many Zs) and double-barrelled second ones.

Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur on fashion journalism

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Erwin Knoll

Here in the news media, our focus is on speed. When we get hold of some new and possibly inaccurate information, our highest priority is to get it to you, the public, before our competitors do. If the news media owned airlines, there would be a lot less concern about how many planes crashed, and a lot more concern about whose plane hit the ground first.

Dave Barry

Advertising

While the advertising industry produces much entertaining and funny work, quotes about advertising tend to focus on the downsides.

Do not tell my mother I’m in advertising … she thinks I’m a pianist in a brothel.

Jacques Seguela

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

John Wanamaker

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

George Orwell

Engineers

These funny work quotes focus on the people who build the machinery of our world. The fruits of their labour would be foolproof, if only fools weren’t so clever.

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

Scott Adams

Normal people … believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

Scott Adams

Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.

A.R. Dykes

The corporate world

Let’s finish with a portfolio of insults about jobs in the corporate sector, and the funny business of the business world.

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.

John Cleese

Consultants are people who borrow your watch to tell you the time and then walk off with it.

Robert Townsend

Finance, noun. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager. 

Ambrose Bierce

Actuary: Someone who cannot stand the excitement of chartered accountancy.

Glan Thomas

Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

Howard Scott

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