Dilbert creator Scott Adams died in January 2026, roughly two years after his career collapsed when he revealed racist views about Black people, prompting newspapers and distributor Andrews McMeel Syndication to drop the strip. Polygon, while acknowledging Adams was a deeply flawed and hateful individual, revisits the comic strip's legacy as part of a series celebrating classic comic strips, attempting to separate the work from its creator and identify its single best quote.

Dilbert ran from 1999 to 2023, producing more than 12,000 strips that appeared in over 2,000 newspapers at its peak, alongside merchandise and a short-lived cartoon adaptation. Its success came from capturing office-worker frustrations in a way comparable to Office Space and The Office. After weighing cynical corporate quotes such as "The key to happiness is self-delusion," the writer settles on "When did ignorance become a point of view?" as the definitive line, valuing it as both a fitting summary of the strip's tone and an implicit rebuke of Adams' own bigotry.