26 Years Later, the Best 'Dilbert' Quote Remains a Comic Strip Classic Despite Its Controversial Creator

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@ 07/09/2026

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Published Sep 7, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT

A mostly futile attempt to separate the art from the artist

My foolhardy quest to find the best Dilbert quote

To kick things off, let’s make clear that I think Scott Adams was a terrible person. After a successful career as the cartoonist behind Dilbert, the man blew his career up in the 2020s by revealing that he harbored disgusting views about people of color, specifically Black people. This resulted in immediate backlash and Dilbert was dropped from so many newspapers that Dilbert distributor Andrews McMeel Syndication dropped the comic too. In 2025, Adams announced he had Stage IV prostate cancer and he died in January 2026.

Had he kept his mouth shut about his racist views for just a couple of years longer, we might never know how hate-filled the guy was, but I tend to think it’s good that he revealed his true nature before he died. Otherwise, the undeserving man would have been more celebrated when he passed.

It is worth mentioning, though, just how successful Adams had been. Dilbert ran from 1999 until 2023, totaling more than 12,000 comic strips. Dilbert appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers at its height. The comic also had tons of merchandise made and a short-lived cartoon series (which was great, but that’s a different hill to die on for another day). The reason for this success was that Dilbert perfectly captured the frustrations of working in a corporate office in a way that was on par with Mike Judge’s 1999 film Office Space, as well as the British and American versions of The Office (especially the British original). Dilbert spoke to people trapped in that monotony themselves, so much so that it became common for office workers to post Dilbert comics on the inside of their cubicles.

Recently, Polygon has been tracking down the best quotes and panels of some of the greatest comic strips of all time, including Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, and The Far Side. And while I still think Adams was an awful person, I wondered if it might be possible to track down the best Dilbert quote, too — a quote that spoke to why the comic was so successful, regardless of the man behind the strip — if such a thing is even possible.

I’ll admit that I didn't enjoy this search as much as the other comic strip pieces I’ve done. When revisiting the likes of Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, I would get caught up in reading dozens of comics, simply out of the pure joy they brought. But with Dilbert, I couldn’t quite get myself to forget who I was reading, even if the comics themselves were entirely apolitical.

I wanted to pick a quote that spoke to Dilbert’s central, cynical viewpoint, specifically the frustrations of working with people in an office, particularly in a setting where a person feels they are smarter and more qualified than most of the people around and definitely those above them. In that regard, there were a lot of good quotes, like, “Leadership is the art of trading imaginary things in the future for real things today.”

“The key to happiness is self-delusion” is another good one.

My favorite that I found ended up being “As you gain experience, you’ll realize that all logical questions are considered insubordination.”

But regardless of how funny and well-written these quotes are and how well they speak to that corporate frustration that made Adams’ creation famous, I felt like the best Dilbert quote shouldn’t just speak to that cynical sense of frustration. It should also be a rebuke of Adams’ hateful viewpoints, which is why I’ll say that this is the best Dilbert quote:

“When did ignorance become a point of view?”

There may very well be better Dilbert quotes out there, but that’s about all the Dilbert I can take right now.