Incompetence Quotes - page 4

Conditions of misery, suffering, war, and war profiteering were the incentive and inspiration for my work. I was also motivated by the seeming incompetence of governments, the academic world, and a lack of solutions from scientists. Many fail as generalists because of their over-specialization on limited aspects of social problems. Scientists, politicians, and academicians see problems from inside the system they're in, which is what's responsible for the problems in the first place. I am disappointed with those who worry about terra-forming other planets while our own is still full of war, poverty, hunger, and environmental neglect. (Jacque Fresco)
I don't know what I'm doing, but my incompetence has never stopped my enthusiasm.
Woody Allen
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
Marge Piercy
Clausewitz to be sure, had gone out of his way to point out that armies even when commanded by Napoleon, had rarely defeated opposing armies of as much as twice their size-thus indicating a certain boundary on the influence not only of morale but also of skill in generalship. And when greatly superior forces were defeated by lesser ones, Clausewitz hinted, it was usually because of as much owing to gross incompetence on one side as to exceptional competence on the other. Let us acknowledge the genius of blunder as well as the genius of correct action! The former appeared at least as often as the latter and has had at least as much influence on history.
Bernard Brodie
I've always maintained that black people and women suffer from a presumption of incompetence. The burdens of proof are different. It just gets so tiresome.
Carol Moseley Braun
When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job; we have also become a party to the bloody events that we are supposed to be reporting. If we cannot tell the truth about the shooting down of a civilian airliner - because this will harm 'our' side in a war or because it will cast one of our 'hate' countries in the role of victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper - then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place. If we cannot blow the whistle on a navy that shoots civilians out of the sky, then we make future killings of the same kind as 'understandable' as Mrs Thatcher found this one. Delete the Americans' panic and incompetence - all of which would be revealed in the months to come - and pretend an innocent pilot is a suicidal maniac, and it's only a matter of time before we blow another airliner out of the sky. Journalism can be lethal.
Robert Fisk
That's what liberalism is all about, is promoting incompetence on the basis it's fair, because people would be the best if they weren't discriminated against.
Rush Limbaugh
I am bothered by the misinformation which gets disseminated uncritically through the media and by the obstructions which prevent correct information from being disseminated. These obstructions come about in many ways - personal, institutional, through self-imposed inhibitions, through external inhibitions, through outright dishonesty, through incompetence - the list is a long one.
Serge Lang
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
Douglas Adams
My dear Pratella, I submit to your futurist genius these new ideas, and I invite you to discuss them with me. I am not a musician, so that I have no acoustic preferences, nor works to defend. I am a futurist painter who projects on a profoundly loved art his will to renew everything. This is why, bolder than the bolder professional musician, totally unpreoccupied with my apparent incompetence, knowing that audacity gives all prerogatives and all possibilities, I have conceived the renovation of music through the Art of Noise. Luigi Russolo Painter Milano, March 11, 1913. (Luigi Russolo)
Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence. We have not yet found the right road to conquering ourselves and our environment.
Dora Russell
A game of cricket is at work from the first ball to the last in shaping an outline or design for itself. Sometimes the design degenerates into dullness and incompetence, but design there always is, and there is an interest even in the tracing of the course and impulse of its failures.
Dudley Carew
Rewarding incompetence and ignorance increases the number of incompetent programmers. Designing programming languages and tools so incompetent programmers can feel better about themselves is not the way to go.
Erik Naggum
Letters from teachers continue to confirm the incompetence which they deny. A teacher in Montana says that my criticisms of teachers are "nieve." No, that wasn't a typographical error. He spelled it that way twice.
Thomas Sowell
To the president the Democrats should be saying, Double or Nothing is Not a Foreign Policy.The great bulk of the public doesn't believe this president any more when he tries to gin up a phony crisis. They don't believe he'd have much of an idea of how to deal with a real one. Enough of the lies. Enough of the incompetence and failure.No buying into another of the president's phony crises.
Josh Marshall
The author has the reputation of being against color. I am indeed against color when it masks incompetence; when it allows the superimposition of characteristics to the point of absurdity; when people believe it capable of representing ordered data.
Jacques Bertin
Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.
Peter Drucker
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
Peter Drucker
We must review oil deregulation law and study the following: Removing VAT, lowering tariff, re-imposing price ceilings and prohibiting price manipulation. We should also spend on research and development to find alternate and indigenous sources of energy. The summit will not accomplish anything other than to highlight the ignorance and incompetence of energy officials who need to call a summit just to find out what's going on.
Francis Escudero
Count Erskyll said nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer. (H. Beam Piper)
All in all, it was probably a good thing these youths had no political interests. They were just the sort of people who started revolutions but could not finish them, their idealism betrayed by their incompetence.
Lois McMaster Bujold
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
On Vice President Leni Robredo: I don't think she can ever be ready to govern a country. Reason? Incompetence. She's not capable of running a country like this, Philippines.
Rodrigo Duterte
It should have been the easiest invasion in history, and the incompetence and arrogance of the Pentagon planners turned it into a total catastrophe. So yes, it hasn't worked out the way they wanted, but that has nothing to do with their plans. It would be like saying that Hitler didn't intend to conquer the world because he failed. They actually succeeded in creating an insurgency, which didn't exist, there was no basis for it and no outside support. In fact, the U.S. and Britain were compelled to allow elections. The elections in Iraq are a triumph of mass popular nonviolent resistance. Washington and London tried in every way they could to evade elections. You go back through 2003, there was one after another scheme proposed, to try to avoid elections. But they couldn't do it, there were mass demonstrations, partially led by Ayatollah Sistani. Finally they had to back down, and allow elections. Now they're trying in every way to subvert them.
Noam Chomsky