Life & Wisdom Quote by Laurence J. Peter

The line lands like a sly slap to the face of self-help optimism: stop waiting for miracles as a comforting exception, and start treating them as part of the job description. Coming from Laurence J. Peter, the wry mind behind the Peter Principle, it reads less like inspiration than diagnosis. In his world, organizations are built to fail upward, competence is brittle, and systems quietly reward the wrong behaviors. Under those conditions, “miracles” aren’t supernatural; they’re the improbable rescues that keep flawed machinery from grinding everyone into dust.

The first clause scolds naive credulity: don’t build your life around magical thinking, don’t confuse hope with a plan. Then the pivot twists the knife. “Depend on them” exposes the uncomfortable truth of modern work and modern institutions: we publicly worship rational process, metrics, and best practices while privately surviving on last-minute heroics, lucky breaks, and someone quietly bending the rules. The quote’s humor comes from that hypocrisy. We pretend competence is engineered; we know it’s often improvised.

It also carries a critique of managerial culture. If your operation “depends on miracles,” the problem isn’t faith, it’s design: under-resourcing, unrealistic timelines, reward structures that punish caution and celebrate firefighting. Peter’s intent is to make the listener laugh, then squirm. The subtext is brutal: if you’re counting on miracles, you’re already admitting the system can’t deliver what it promises. That’s not cynicism for its own sake; it’s an invitation to notice the absurdity we’ve normalized.