Top 100 Quotes About Incompetence
#1. An incompetent person in a responsible position may cause huge damage. Such a person should act less and think more.
Eraldo Banovac
#2. A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.
Ayn Rand
#4. Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.
George V. Higgins
#7. Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure to hide the flavor of their own incompetence.
George R R Martin
#8. Guilt is a guide that will lead me whenever I choose to follow. It will raise its righteous banner and take me to the wasteland of my incompetence. Guilt is a voice that will speak whenever i choose to listen. It will mournfully address any subject but one : correcting the mistake.
Hugh Prather
#9. [On Obama Administration] I've never heard any administration or any business or anybody ever claim incompetence more than this group of people,
Glenn Beck
#10. Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#11. I do not scruple to employ mendacity and a fictitious appearance of female incompetence when the occasion demands it.
Elizabeth Peters
#12. Rowl was not prepared to tolerate incompetence where his personal human was concerned. He had just gotten her properly trained.
Jim Butcher
#13. One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
Thomas Sowell
#14. Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#15. The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.
James C. Collins
#16. The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#17. Guilt is the sum total of: All the negative feelings we have ever had about ourselves! Any form of self-hatred, self-rejection, feelings of worthlessness, sinfulness, inferiority, incompetence, failure, or emptiness. The feeling that there are things in us that are lacking or missing or incomplete.
Kenneth Wapnick
#18. It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.
Peter Drucker
#19. The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the State until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#20. In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.
Anthony Zinni
#22. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Unknown
#23. When focusing only on one's credentials one boasts his own incompetence in his capacity for discernment of the individual.
Criss Jami
#24. I didn't answer her. All I could have said was I don't know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.
Jeff VanderMeer
#25. There is a difference between really being concerned about service delivery and incompetence and just complaining for the sake of it.
Zelda La Grange
#26. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
King Samuel Benson
#27. Secrecy breeds incompetence because where there is failure, failure is kept secret.
Julian Assange
#28. I hate to admit it, but governmental deviousness is usually better explained by incompetence, vanity, and the need to protect one's job at all costs.
Jasper Fforde
#29. Marriage, laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.
Dora Russell
#30. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.
Fareed Zakaria
#31. Some oysters which Griselda had ordered, and which would seem to be beyond the reach of incompetence, we were, unfortunately, not able to sample as we had nothing in the house to open them with - an omission which was discovered only when the moment for eating them arrived.
Agatha Christie
#32. A bad workman quarrels with the man who calls him that.
Ambrose Bierce
#33. It happens; incompetence is rewarded more often than not.
Jeff Lindsay
#34. The problem is with men. I know I shouldn't say this, but they've shrouded and hidden women to hide their incompetence.
John Galliano
#35. A person who is careless about money is careless about everything, and untrustworthy in everything.
Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
#36. People deal with all sorts of obstacles at work. There is the fear of failure, plus confrontations with mindless bureaucracy, with other people's egos, with your own ego, with unethical practices, with incompetence, and a wide variety of issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation
Lodro Rinzler
#37. Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence.
J.D. Salinger
#38. Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.
Ayn Rand
#39. You basically have a group of four spies who are chosen for a mission they feel for the fact of how competent they are and how their expertise and they're the right one for the job. But ultimately they find out they've been actually chosen for their incompetence.
Matt LeBlanc
#41. Incompetence is often highly regarded in governmental circles.
William Wallace
#42. There are so many angles to follow up: government incompetence, sophisticated charity scams, how insurance companies treat victims, construction of the levees, who will start ripping off the billions of dollars available in new contracts. Every single one of these stories is going to be a big one.
Brian Ross
#43. four stages of learning: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.
Tony Jeary
#44. Those who wish to deal with me, must do so on my terms or not at all. I do not make terms with incompetence.
Ayn Rand
#45. As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving.
John Stossel
#46. Yet, after all, they were not bad souls; and though he failed so grotesquely, he did his incompetent best.
Isabella L. Bird
#47. I don't know what I'm doing, but my incompetence has never stopped my enthusiasm.
Woody Allen
#48. I am, as I've said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.
Billy Joel
#49. I hate incompetence. I think it's probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn't make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary.
Ayn Rand
#50. It's not logical that we boast the most advanced and powerful internationally integrated economy in the world, then claim organizational incompetence and poverty when it comes to creating and funding a national health care system for all Americans.
Jesse Jackson Jr.
#51. A staff increase may produce a temporary improvement, but the promotion process eventually produces its effect on the newcomers and they, too, rise to their levels of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#52. But the technology was accessible, which suggests incompetence on the part of our counterintelligence community and the Clinton Administration, and may in fact rise to the level of treason.
Charles Bass
#53. Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.
Connie Willis
#54. When men and women produce a baby together for the first time, it's an absolute festival of mutual incompetence.
From The Wife Drought
Annabel Crabb
#55. As individuals we tend to climb to our levels of incompetence. We behave as though up is better and more is better, and yet all around us we see the tragic victims of this mindless escalation.
Laurence J. Peter
#56. In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.
Charles Krauthammer
#57. The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
Quentin Crisp
#58. Conspiracies existed, to be sure; many of them, and many were dark indeed. But fiendish? Fiendishness required brains. Nine times out of ten, conspirators behaved like buffoons and wound up exposing themselves out of sheer, bumbling incompetence.
Eric Flint
#59. Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
Arthur C. Clarke
#61. Many a man, under the old and the new systems, has made the upward step from candidate to legislator, only to achieve his level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#63. [ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
Gore Vidal
#64. Sometimes history is just an excuse for incompetence at getting along with each other.
Aleksandr Voinov
#65. The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
Upton Sinclair
#66. She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down-keep down-slow down-don't do your best, it is not wanted!
Ayn Rand
#67. There is a dedication to willful incompetence in many corporate government departments.
Steven Magee
#68. I believe email-based status reports are the clearest and best signs of managerial incompetence and laziness.
Rands
#69. The Republicans are running wild with our tax dollars and it's been a mistake to let this administration continue a policy of incompetence when it comes to Iraq.
Sherrod Brown
#70. Socialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal - or have stolen for you what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leaches, and mosquitoes.
L. Neil Smith
#71. I want an immediate explanation of the infernal muddle your incompetence has made.
Anthony Powell
#72. I am well aware of my incompetence in predicting human reactions. But I would have been prepared to bet on the first word that Rosie would say when she received the information. I was correct by a factor of six. 'Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Graeme Simsion
#73. Ignorance is the worst liberation. To know even a few is better than knowing nothing at all.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#74. If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
Richard Hofstadter
#75. People keep saying, "God is in the details". He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.
Christopher Hitchens
#77. In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence or not fulfilling the terms of a contract.
Michael Shermer
#79. One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#80. My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.
Jimmy Page
#81. He must examine his objectives and see that true progress is achieved through moving forward to a better way of life, rather than upward to total life incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
#82. Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
Brian Eno
#83. I have no idea what I am doing but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.
Woody Allen
#84. Nonsense. Every month it's the same routine, and when you are late, I am late. Do you think I want to get my chestnuts roasted for your incompetence?
R. Cooper
#85. The incompetence regarding body and vehicle armor rises almost to a level of criminal negligence.
John Olver
#86. Behold the crucifix; what does it symbolize? Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree.
Anton Szandor LaVey
#87. From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won't do; it's mindboggling screw-ups that are required.
Warren Buffett
#88. I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice, no tolerance for government incompetence, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens.
Donald Trump
#90. For the ANC to cry 'sabotage' the night before crucial local government elections shows just how desperate they are to disguise their incompetence and mismanagement.
Helen Zille
#91. Professionalism is like love: it is made up of the constant flow of little bits of proof that testify to devotion and care. Everything else is pretension or incompetence.
Tomislav Sola
#92. Government failure is always used as an excuse for government expansion. Government thrives on crisis and incompetence.
Jim Babka
#93. Useful men, who do useful things, don't mind being treated as useless.
But the useless always judge themselves as being important and hide all their incompetence behind authority.
Paulo Coelho
#94. The utter incompetence of the U.N. is literally incomprehensible.
Malcolm Wallop
#95. Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him.
Douglas Adams
#96. This is a great nation at terrible risk in a dangerous world, and she has fully exposed this nation and will continue to do so because of her utter incompetence and Hillary Clinton lack of care, lack of attention, lack of concern.
Rush Limbaugh
#97. All the 'too close to call' announcements are not due to incompetence ... It's caution.
Chris Matthews
#98. Attempted murder should carry the same penalty as first-degree murder. Otherwise, you're simply rewarding incompetence.
Burt Prelutsky
#99. When I see the promotion of nighttime street lighting to the masses, I realize the great level of incompetence that is present in governments, human health and the biological effects of light.
Steven Magee
#100. Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power.
Josh Marshall
