Jokes and Puns: Lighten up your day!

Leahy's Law: If a thing is done wrong often enough, it becomes right.
Corollary: Volume is a defense to error.

Lawyer's Rule: When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyer names.

Laura's Law: No child throws up in the bathroom.

Law of Late-Comers: Those who have the shortest distance to travel invariably arrive latest.

La Rochefoucauld's Law: It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them.

Lani's Principles of Economics:
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
$100 placed at 7% interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000 by which time it will be worth nothing.
In God we trust; all others pay cash.

Langsam's Law: Everything depends.

Langin's Law: If things were left to chance, they'd be better.

LaCombe's Rule of Percentages: The incidence of anything worthwhile is either 15-25 percent or 80-90 percent.
Corollary (Dudenhoefer) An answer of 50 percent will suffice for the 40-60 range.

First Law of Laboratory Work: Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass.

Labor Law: A disagreeable law is its own reward.

Krueger's Observation: A taxpayer is someone who does not have to take a civil service exam in order to work for the government.

Kristol's Law: Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want.

Korman's conclusion: The trouble with resisting temptation is it may never come your way again.

Koppett's Law: Whatever creates the greatest inconvenience for the largest number must happen.

Kohn's Second Law: Any experiment is reproducible until another laboratory tries to repeat it.

Knowles's Law of Legislative Deliberation: The length of debate varies inversely with the complexity of the issue.
Corollary: When the issue is trivial, and everyone understands it, debate is almost interminable.

Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Knight's Law: Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans.

Klipstein's Laws: Applied to General Engineering:

A patent application will be preceded by one week by a similar application made by an independent worker.
Firmness of delivery dates is inversely proportional to the tightness of the schedule.
Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
Any wire cut to length will be too short.
Applied to Prototyping and Production:
Tolerances will accumulate unidirectionally toward maximum difficulty to assemble.
If a project requires n components, there will be n-1 units in stock.
A motor will rotate in the wrong direction.
A failsafe circuit will destroy others.
A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by blowing first.
A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.
A purchased component or instrument will meet its specs long enough, and only long enough, to pass incoming inspection.
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted.
After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found on the bench.

Klipstein's Law of Specifications: In specifications, Murphy's Law supersedes Ohm's.

Klipstein's Observation: Any product cut to length will be too short.

Klipstein's Lament: All warranty and guarantee clauses are voided by payment of the invoice.

Kitman's Law: On the TV screen, pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel.

Kirkland's Law: The usefulness of any meeting is in inverse proportion to the attendance.

Kharasch's Institutional Imperative: Every action or decision of an institution must be intended to keep the institution machinery working.
Corollary: The expert judgment of an institution, when the matter involved concerns continuation of the institution's operations, is totally predictable, and hence the finding is totally worthless.

Key to Status: S = D/K. S is the status of a person in an organization, D is the number of doors he must open to perform his job, and K is the number of keys he carries. A higher number denotes higher status. Thus the janitor needs to open 20 doors and has 20 keys (S = 1), a secretary has to open two doors with one key (S = 2), but the president never has to carry any keys since there is always someone around to open doors for him (with K = 0 and a high D, his S reaches infinity).

Kettering's Laws:
If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

Kerr-Martin Law:
In dealing with their own problems, faculty members are the most extreme conservatives.
In dealing with other people's problems, they are the world's most extreme liberals.

Kent's Law: The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.

Kennedy's Law: Excessive official restraints on information are inevitably self-defeating and productive of headaches for the officials concerned.

Kelly's Law: An executive will always return to work from lunch early if no one takes him.

Kelley's Law: Last guys don't finish nice.

Katz's Maxims:

Where are the calculations that go with the calculated risk?
Inventing is easy for staff outfits. Stating a problem is much harder. Instead of stating problems, people like to pass out half- accurate statements together with half-available solutions which they can't finish and which they want you to finish.
Every organization is self-perpetuating. Don't ever ask an outfit to justify itself, or you'll be covered with facts, figures, and fancy. The criterion should rather be, "What will happen if the outfit stops doing what it's doing?" The value of an organization is more easily determined this way.
Try to find out who's doing the work, not who's writing about it, controlling it, or summarizing it.
Watch out for formal briefings; they often produce an avalanche (a high-level snow job of massive and overwhelming proportions).
The difficulty of the coordination task often blinds one to the fact that a fully coordinated piece of paper is not supposed to be either the major or the final product of the organization, but it often turns out that way.
Most organizations can't hold more than one idea at a time. Thus complementary ideas are always regarded as competetive. Further, like a quantized pendulum, an organization can jump from one extreme to the other, without ever going through the middle.
Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is it something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of "contractor grammar", defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future.

Katz's Law: Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Kaplan's Law of the Instrument: Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

Kamin's Seventh Law: Politicians will always inflate when given the opportunity.

Kamin's Sixth Law: When attempting to predict and forecast macro-economic moves or economic legislation by a politician, never be misled by what he says; instead watch what he does.

Kamin's Fifth Law: Purchasing power of currency is always lost far more rapidly than ever regained. (Those who expect even fluctuations in both directions play a losing game.)

Kamin's Fourth Law: Government inflation is always worse than statistics indicate: central bankers are biased toward inflation when the money unit is non-convertible, and without gold or silver backing.

Kamin's Third Law: Combined total taxation from all levels of government will always increase (until the government is replaced by war or revolution).

Kamin's Second Law: Threat of capital controls accelerates marginal capital outflows.

Kamin's First Law: All currencies will decrease in value and purchasing power over the long term, unless they are freely and fully convertable into gold and that gold is traded freely without restrictions of any kind.

Kafka's Law: In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Juhani's Law: The compromise will always be more expensive than either of the suggestions it's compromising.

Jones's Principle: Needs are a function of what other people have.

Jones's Motto: Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
McClaughry's Codicil on Jones's Motto: To make an enemy, do someone a favor.

Jones's Law: The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on.

Johnson-Laird's Law: Toothache tends to start on Saturday night.

Johnson's First Law of Auto Repair: Any tool dropped while repairing an automobile will roll under the car to the vehicle's exact geographic center.

Johnson's Third Law: If you miss one issue of any magazine, it will be the issue containing the article, story, or installment you were most anxious to read.
Corollary: All of your friends either missed it, lost it, or threw it out.

Johnson's Second Law: If, in the course of several months, only three worthwhile social events take place, they will all fall on the same evening.

Johnson's First Law: When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the most inconvenient possible time.

John's Collateral Corollary: In order to get a loan you must first prove you don't need it.

John's Axiom: When your opponent is down, kick him.

Jinny's Law: There is no such thing as a short beer. (As in, "I'm going to stop off at Joe's for a short beer before on the way home.")

Jenkinson's Law: It won't work.

Jay's Laws of Leadership:
Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else is creativity.
To build something that endures, it is of the greatest important to have a long tenure in office -- to rule for many years. You can achieve a quick success in a year or two, but nearly all of the great tycoons have continued their building much longer.

Jaroslovsky's Law: The distance you have to park from your apartment increases in proportion to the weight of packages you are carrying.

Jake's Law: Anything hit with a big enough hammer will fall apart.

Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Governments: No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Italian Proverb: She who is silent consents.

First Postulate of Isomorphism: Things equal to nothing else are equal to each other.

Issawi's Observation on the Consumption of Paper: Each system has its own way of consuming vast amounts of paper: in socialist societies by filling large forms in quadruplicate, in capitalist societies by putting up huge posters and wrapping every article in four layers of cardboard.

Issawi's Law of the Social Sciences: By the time a social science theory is formulated in such a way that it can be tested, changing circumstances have already made it obsolete.

Issawi's Laws of Progress:

The Course of Progress: Most things get steadily worse. The Path of Progress: A shortcut is the longest distance between two points. The Dialectics of Progress: Direct action produces direct reaction. The Pace of Progress: Society is a mule, not a car . . . If pressed too hard, it will kick and throw off its rider.

Issawi's Law of Frustration: One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs -- but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelette.

Issawi's Law of Estimation of Error: Experts in advanced countries underestimate by a factor of 2 to 4 the ability of people in underdeveloped countries to do anything technical.

Issawi's Law of Dogmatism: When we call others dogmatic, what we really object to is their holding dogmas that are different from our own.

Issawi's Law of Cynics: Cynics are right nine times out of ten; what undoes them is their belief that they are right ten times out of ten.

Issawi's Law of Consumption Patterns: Other people's patterns of expenditure and consumption are highly irrational and slightly immoral.

Issawi's Law of the Conservation of Evil: The total amount of evil in any system remains constant. Hence, any diminution in one direction -- for instance, a reduction in poverty or unemployment -- is accompanied by an increase in another, e.g., crime or air pollution.

Issawi's Laws of Committo-Dynamics:
Comitas comitatum, omnia comitas.
The less you enjoy serving on committees, the more likely you are to be pressed to do so.

Issawi's Law of Aggression: At any given moment, a society contains a certain amount of accumulated and accruing aggressiveness. If more than 21 years elapse without this aggressiveness being directed outward, in a popular war against other countries, it turns inward, in social unrest, civil disturbances, and political disruption.

Iron Law of Distribution: Them what has -- gets.
Wakefield's Refutation of the Iron Law of Distribution: Them what gets -- has.

Law of Institutions: The opulence of the front office decor varies inversely with the fundamental solvency of the firm.

Laws of Institutional Food:
Everything is cold except what should be.
Everything, including the corn flakes, is greasy.

Law of the Individual: Nobody really cares or understands what anyone else is doing.

Index of Development: The degree of a country's development is measured by the ratio of the price of an automobile to the cost of a haircut. The lower the ratio, the higher the degree of development.

Imhoff's Law: The organization of any bureaucracy is very much like a septic tank -- the REALLY big chunks always rise to the top.