Squeaky Wheel Quotes

The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot. ~ Carl Sandburg

Why do I always choose the shopping cart with the squeaky wheel? Is it my bad luck, or are all the carts dysfunctional? ~ Rachel Nichols

We need to treat each other with consideration. In my world, the squeaky wheel does not get the grease. ~ Tim Gunn

The Creed for the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive (Peter's Laws)


1. If anything can go wrong, Fix it!!! (To hell with Murphy!!)
2. When given a choice - Take Both!!
3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
4. Start at the top, then work your way up.
5. Do it by the book... but be the author!
6. When forced to compromise, ask for more.
7. If you can't beat them, join them, then beat them.
8. If it's worth doing, it's got to be done right now.
9. If you can't win, change the rules.
10. If you can't change the rules, then ignore them.
11. Perfection is not optional.
12. When faced without a challenge, make one.
13. "No" simply means begin again at one level higher.
14. Don't walk when you can run.
15. Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when necessary.
16. When in doubt: THINK!
17. Patience is a virtue, but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.
18. The squeaky wheel gets replaced.
19. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.
20. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!! ~ Peter Safar

I noticed, when I taught elementary school, how true the squeaky wheel thing is, and how endearing squeaky wheels can be! Because when you're being a squeaky wheel, you're also really letting people know who you are. ~ Aimee Bender

The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease. ~ Josh Billings

Though we might have precious little
It's still precious

I like that song about this wonderful world
It's got a sunny point of view
And sometimes I feel it's true
At least for a few of us
I like that world, it makes a wonderful song
But there's a darker point of view
But sadly just as true
For so many among us

Though we might have precious little
It's still precious

In the sweetest child there's a vicious streak
In the strongest man there's a child so weak
In the whole wide world there's no magic place
So you might as well rise put on your bravest face

I like that show where they solve all the murders
An heroic point of view
It's got justice and vengeance too
At least so the story goes
I like that story, makes a satisfying case
But there's a messy point of view
That's sadly just as true
For so many among us

In softest voice there's an acid tongue
In the oldest eyes there's a soul so young
In the shakiest will there's a core of steel
On the smoothest ride there's a squeaky wheel

Though we might have precious little
It's still precious ~ Rush

And fourthly there is a major shift in public opinion and attitude to accommodate to the post-9/11 mentality and the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy. I think the public has simply become increasingly accustomed to being turned away from vital information and is protesting less and less. You have some squeaky wheels out there, but I don't think they're representative of the population at large. ~ Ted Gup

Plenty of Disney kids are perfectly normal and love what they do. But you always hear about the people who aren't doing well. It's kind of like the squeaky wheel. ~ Ashley Greene

Be a squeaky wheel but talk nice ~ Blue Balliett

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel. ~ Ivan Turgenev

All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road. ~ Jack Kerouac

Public sentiment is to public officers what water is to the wheel of the mill. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Today I saw a car crush my little dog under it's wheel. ~ Todd Rundgren

The Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning. ~ C.S. Lewis

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. ~ Maria Semple

That's just something instinctual within men. We always feel like we've got to protect our stuff. Even if it's not worth protecting, we want to protect it. You ever seen people who have like a piece of crap Pinto with a Club on the steering wheel. Somebody breaks the window, steals the Club, leaves the Pinto in a pile of glass. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

The wheel ... is an extension of the foot.
The book ... is an extension of the eye ...
Clothing, an extension of the skin ...
Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. ~ Marshall McLuhan

I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us? ~ Steve Toltz

Perhaps success is best defined as maximizing the ratio of your rear wheel horsepower to your engine horsepower. Higher %, happier times. ~ Tim Fargo

I climb behind the steering wheel... I drive off immediately without once looking back; it's a long journey but it leads to freedom. ~ Corinne Hofmann

All people in relationships ever do is talk about their relationship status. It like a Ferris wheel. When you're on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else. ~ John Green

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,
but the empty space between them
is the essence of the wheel.
Pots are formed from clay,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the pot.
Walls with windows and doors
form the house,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the home. ~ Laozi

Mistral. Take the wheel for a while. I'll go down to the galley ~ Daniel Silva

A man without religion or spiritual vision is like a captain who finds himself in the midst of an uncharted sea, without compass, rudder and steering wheel. He never knows where he is, which way he is going and where he is going to land. ~ William J.H. Boetcker

After getting driven into the ground by the policies of the Bush administration, the economy is creeping up. It's doing that because people are sticking their shoulders to the wheel. Community banks are doing a lot of lending to small businesses and keeping them going. ~ Stephen Stills

But Roosevelt was just as much a faker. He constructed his macho persona from the ground up. When he first entered public life at the age of twenty-three as a New York state assemblyman, he was a rich kid with soft hands, a squeaky voice, and clothes that were a little too fashionable for his own good. The newspapers gave him nicknames: "Jane-Dandy," "our own Oscar Wilde," and "Punkin-Lily." He went west to shake this reputation. Viewed from this angle, Roosevelt's entire life looks like one gigantic exercise in overcompensation. ~ Nathanael Johnson

I celebrated [my 50th birthday] by throwing a big bowl on the pottery wheel, then going for a water ski at the lake on our property in the Catskills, and that night, skinny-dipping under the stars. Just being free and joyful. And that's how I [felt] about turning 50. ~ Marcia Gay Harden

Even if the steering wheel fits, you don't have to keep gripping it. ~ Beth Moore

If CART continues on, it's just going to drag all of open-wheel racing down. ~ Michael Andretti

Then, on a left-hand curve 2.8 kilometres from the finish line, Marco delivers another cutting acceleration. Tonkov is immediately out of the saddle. The gap reaches two lengths. Tonkov fights his way back and is on Marco's wheel when Marco, who is still standing on the pedals, accelerates again. Suddenly Tonkov is no longer there. Afterwards Tonkov would say he could no longer feel his hands and feet. 'I had to stop. I lost his slipstream. I couldn't go on.' Marco told Romano Cenni he could taste blood. His performance on Montecampione was close to self-mutilation.
Seven hundred metres from the finish line, the TV camera on the inside of the final right-hand bend, looking down the hill, picks Marco up over two hundred metres from the line and follows him for fifty metres, a fifteen-second close-up, grainy, pallid in the late-afternoon light. A car and motorbike, diffused and ghostlike, pass between the camera and Marco, emerging out of the gloom. The image cuts to another camera, tight on him as he swings round into the finishing straight, a five-second flash before the live, wide shot of the stage finish: Marco, framed between ecstatic fans on either side, and the finish-line scaffolding adorned with race sponsors' logos; largest, and centrally, the Gazzetta dello Sport, surrounded by branding for iced tea, shower gel, telephone services.
Then we see it again in the super-slow-motion replay; the five seconds between the moment Marco appeared in the closing straigh ~ Matt Rendell

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.
It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose. ~ Dagobert D. Runes

Men's fortunes are on a wheel, which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper for ever. ~ Herodotus

As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future ... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you. ~ Feist

Adrenaline kicks you in when you're starving. That's what nobody understands. Except for being hungry and cold, most of the time I feel like I can do anything. It gives me superhuman powers of smell and hearing. I can see what people are thinking, stay two steps ahead of them. I do enough homework to stay off the radar. Every night I climb thousands of steps into the sky to make me so exhausted that when I fall into bed, I don't notice Cassie. Then suddenly it's morning and I leap on the hamster wheel and it starts all over again. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I was just learning how to read and was reading every sign out loud, practising, and when I saw Cockburn Avenue I said Cock Burn Avenue and then asked what's that? And Elf, she must have been eleven or twelve, said that's from too much sex and my mother said shhhh from the front passenger seat and we didn't dare look over at my dad who clutched the wheel and peered out the windshield like a sniper tracking his target. There were two things he didn't ever want to talk about and they were sex and Russia. ~ Miriam Toews

There are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Keep away from sharp swords,
Don't go near a lovely woman.
A sharp sword too close will wound your hand,
Woman's beauty too close will wound your life.
The danger of the road is not in the distance,
Ten yards is far enough to break a wheel.
The peril of love is not in loving too often,
A single evening can leave its wound in the soul. ~ Meng Chao

RANGE-FINDING The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest Before it stained a single human breast. The stricken flower bent double and so hung. And still the bird revisited her young. A butterfly its fall had dispossessed A moment sought in air his flower of rest, Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung. On the bare upland pasture there had spread O'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread And straining cables wet with silver dew. A sudden passing bullet shook it dry. The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly, But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew. ~ Robert Frost

On the track, I can escape the paparazzi, the groupies … my demons. The only fear I have is that which I've created for myself, that I can control with a swerve of the wheel or a press of the pedal … ~ K. Bromberg

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons. ~ Douglas Adams

Merv Griffin, who developed Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, had a great line once. I used to personally answer all the mail that came in to Jeopardy! whether it was favorable or unfavorable, and Merv said, You know how I handle the nasty mail? I said no. He just grabbed it and folded it up and crunched it up and threw it in the wastebasket. He said, I don't bother with it. ~ Alex Trebek

A searchlight catches the plane for an instant. The cockpit is awash with searing bluish brightness. As if a revelation is about to take place. As if an angel is about to appear. He can't see the instrument panel. The finger of light has the aircraft in its grip. Holding her suspended above the city. As if she is perched on a tightrope. Visible to the whole of Berlin down below. The glare bites into his eyes, sucks strength from his legs. He kicks the rudders to the right. The starboard wing tilts down. He pulls the wheel back. Below, a shifting tableau of coloured globes slide over the tilting smoking surface of the earth. Some roads and buildings made visible by fires and incendiaries. ~ Glenn Haybittle

He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else. Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday clothes the spots do not show. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Tell me this," I said. "My world. It's not like the one I read about in the oldest books. When they talk about magic, about ghosts, it's as if they are fairy-tales to frighten children. And yet I have seen the dead walk, seen a boy bring fire with just a thought."
Fexler frowned as if considering how to explain. "Think of reality as a ship whose course is set, whose wheel is locked in place by universal constants. Our greatest achievement, and downfall, was to turn that wheel, just a fraction. The role of the observer was always important - we discovered that. If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it, then it is both standing and not standing. The cat is both alive and dead."
"Who mentioned a fecking cat? ~ Mark Lawrence

Samsara-the Wheel of Existence, literally, the "Perpetual Wandering"-is the name by which is designated the sea of life ever restlessly heaving up and down, the symbol of this continuous process of ever again and again being born, growing old, suffering, and dying. (It) is constantly changing from moment to moment, (as lives) follow continuously one upon the other through inconceivable periods of time. Of this Samsara, a single lifetime constitutes only a vanishingly tiny fraction. ~ Gautama Buddha

Once in a great while lips meet and two spirits merge for a time and the universe is right and complete and the planets wheel in their proper places. Once in a while the lonely, broken spirit of man is healed and made whole. For a while his quest is over and his questions are answered. ~ Robert A. Heinlein