Jokes and Puns: Lighten up your day!

Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Brontosaurus Principle: Organizations can grow faster than their brains can manage them in relation to their environment and to their own physiology; when this occurs, they are an endangered species.

Broder's Law: Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.

Brien's First Law: At some time in the life cycle of virtually every organization, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out.

First Law of Bridge: It's always the partner's fault.

Branch's First Law of Crisis: The spirit of public service will rise, and the bureaucracy will multiply itself much faster, in time of grave national concern.

Boyle's Laws:
When things are going well, someone will inevitably experiment detrimentally.
The deficiency will never show itself during the dry runs.
Information travels more surely to those with a lesser need to know.
An original idea can never emerge from committee in the original.
When the product is destined to fail, the delivery system will perform perfectly.
The crucial memorandum will be snared in the out-basket by the paper clip of the overlying correspondence and go to file.
Success can be insured only by devising a defense against failure of the contingency plan.
Performance is directly affected by the perversity of inanimate objects.
If not controlled, work will flow to the competent man until he submerges.
The lagging activity in a project will invariably be found in the area where the highest overtime rates lie waiting.
Talent in staff work or sales will recurringly be interpreted as managerial ability.
The "think positive" leader tends to listen to his subordinates' premonitions only during the postmortems.
Clearly stated instructions will consistently produce multiple interpretations.
On successive charts of the same organization the number of boxes will never decrease.

Boultbee's Criterion: If the converse of a statement is absurd, the original statement is an insult to the intelligence and should never have been said.

Boston's Irreversible Law of Clutter: In any household, junk accumulates to fill the space available for its storage.

Borstelmann's Rule: If everything seems to be coming your way, you're probably in the wrong lane.

Borkowski's Law: You can't guard against the arbitrary.

Boren's Laws of the Bureaucracy:
When in doubt, mumble.
When in trouble, delegate.
When in charge, ponder.

Boozer's Revision: A bird in the hand is dead.

Booker's Law: An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.

Boob's Law: You always find something the last place you look.

Bombeck's Rule of Medicine: Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Bolton's Law of Ascending Budgets: Under current practices, both expenditures and revenues rise to meet each other, no matter which one may be in excess.

Boling's Postulate: If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it.

Bok's Law: If you think education is expensive -- try ignorance.

Blanchard's Newspaper Obituary Law: If you want your name spelled wrong, die.

Blaauw's Law: Established technology tends to persist in spite of new technology.

Billings's Law: Live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so.

Berson's Corollary of Inverse Distances: The farther away from the entrance that you have to park, the closer the space vacated by the car that pulls away as you walk up to the door.

Berra's Law: You can observe a lot just by watching.

Berkeley's Laws:

The world is more complicated than most of our theories make it out to be.
Ignorance is no excuse.
Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have a single answer.
An answer may be wrong, right, both, or neither. Most answers are partly right and partly wrong.
A chain of reasoning is no stronger than its weakest link.
A statement may be true independently of illogical reasoning.
Most general statements are false, including this one.
An exception TESTS a rule; it NEVER PROVES it.
The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it -- it probably isn't right.
If there is an opportunity to make a mistake, sooner or later the mistake will be made.
Being sure mistakes will occur is a good frame of mind for catching them.
Check the answer you have worked out once more -- before you tell it to anybody.
Estimating a figure may be enough to catch an error.
Figures calculated in a rush are very hot; they should be allowed to cool off a little before being used; thus we will have a reasonable time to think about the figures and catch mistakes.
A great many problems do not have accurate answers, but do have approximate answers, from which sensible decisions can be made.

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

Belle's Constant: The ratio of time involved in work to time available for work is usually about 0.6.

Becker's Law: It is much harder to find a job than to keep one.

Baxter's First Law: Government intervention in the free market always leads to a lower national standard of living.
Baxter's Second Law: The adoption of fractional gold reserves in a currency system always leads to depreciation, devaluation, demonetization and, ultimately, to complete destruction of that currency.
Baxter's Third Law: In a free market good money always drives bad money out of circulation.

Forthoffer's Cynical Summary of Barzun's Laws:
That which has not yet been taught directly can never be taught directly.
If at first you don't succeed, you will never succeed.

Baruch's Rule for Determining Old Age: Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.

Bartz's Law of Hokey Horsepuckery: The more ridiculous a belief system, the higher the probability of its success.

Barth's Distinction: There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't.

Barr's Comment on Domestic Tranquility: On a beautiful day like this it's hard to believe anyone can be unhappy -- but we'll work on it.

Barrett's Laws of Driving:
The vehicle in front of you is traveling slower than you are.
This lane ends in 500 feet.

Barber's Laws of Backpacking:

The integral of the gravitational potential taken around any loop trail you chose to hike always comes out positive.
Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient to exactly the point of most pressure.
The weight of your pack increases in direct proportion to the amount of food you consume from it. If you run out of food, the pack weight goes on increasing anyway.
The number of stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail.
The difficulty of finding any given trail marker is directly proportional to the importance of the consequences of failing to find it.
The size of each of the stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail.
The remaining distance to your chosen campsite remains constant as twilight approaches.
The net weight of your boots is proportional to the cube of the number of hours you have been on the trail.
When you arrive at your chosen campsite, it is full.
If you take your boots off, you'll never get them back on again.
The local density of mosquitos is inversely proportional to your remaining repellent.

Baldy's Law: Some of it plus the rest of it is all of it.

Baker's Byroad: When you are over the hill, you pick up speed.

Bagdikian's Law of Editor's Speeches: The splendor of an editor's speech and the splendor of his newspaper are inversely related to the distance between the city in which he makes his speech and the city in which he publishes his paper.

Babcock's Law: If it can be borrowed and it can be broken, you will borrow it and you will break it.

Ashley-Perry Statistical Axioms:

Numbers are tools, not rules.
Numbers are symbols for things; the number and the thing are not the same.
Skill in manipulating numbers is a talent, not evidence of divine guidance.
Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from nonpractitioners.
The product of an arithmetical computation is the answer to an equation; it is not the solution to a problem.

Army Axiom: Any order that can be misunderstood has been misunderstood.
Army Law: If it moves, salute it; if it doesn't move, pick it up; if you can't pick it up, paint it.

Laws of Applied Confusion: The one piece that the plant forgot to ship is the one that supports 75% of the balance of the shipment.
Corollary: Not only did the plant forget to ship it, 50% of the time they haven't even made it.
Approval Seeker's Law: Those whose approval you seek the most give you the least.

Corollary: On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first always strike your toes.

Anthony's Law of the Workshop: Any tool, when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop.

Law of Annoyance: When working on a project, if you put away a tool that you're certain you're finished with, you will need it instantly.

Anderson's Law: Any system or program, however complicated, if looked at in exactly the right way, will become even more complicated.

Alley's Axiom: Justice always prevails . . . three times out of seven.

Allen's Axiom: When all else fails, follow instructions.

Agnes Allen's Law: Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.

Alan's Law of Research: The theory is supported as long as the funds are.

Airplane Law: When the plane you are on is late, the plane you want to transfer to is on time.

Ade's Law: Anybody can win -- unless there happens to be a second entry.

Acton's Law: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Acheson's Rule of the Bureaucracy: A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Rule of Accuracy: When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer.
Corollary: Provided, of course, that you know there is a problem.

Abrams's Advice: When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.

Abbott's Admonitions:
If you have to ask, you're not entitled to know.
If you don't like the answer, you shouldn't have asked the question.

The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management.

Any simple theory will be worded in the most complicated way.

Any instrument when dropped will roll into the least accessible corner.

Everything that goes up must come down.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.

When all else fails, read the instructions.

If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.

If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.

To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.

The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.

Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss putting in an honest day's work.

Any given program, when running, is obsolete.

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

New systems generate new problems.

A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.

The first myth of management is that it exists.

A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.

Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
All great discoveries are made by mistake.

Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.