Quotes about Incompetence

...the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incomptence and lack of discipline--a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.

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.

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.

The most important moral of all is that excellence is where you find it. I would extend this generalization to cover not just higher education but all education from vocational high school to graduate school. We must learn to honor excellence, indeed to demand it in every socially accepted human activity, however humble that activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

People are always talking about tradition, but they forget we have a tradition of a few hundred years of nonsense and stupidity, that there is a tradition of idiocy, incompetence and crudity.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

It isn't the incompetent who destroys an organization. The incompetent never gets in a position to destroy it. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up.

An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.

Mankind needs the American type of leadership. Let it be not discredited by those who are out of sympathy with it, who don't understand it or are incompetent to administer it. In America, the demand for power to compel is a confession of incompetence to lead.

Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.

Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

I don't have time to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent.

It isn't the incompetent who destroy an organization. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up.

If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary.

I want you to observe, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic - are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favour of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst - in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become it's deadliest enemies.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made - before it can be looted or mooched - made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

ZANY, n. A popular character in old Italian plays, who imitated with ludicrous incompetence the "buffone", or clown, and was therefore the ape of an ape; for the clown himself imitated the serious characters of the play.

RICH, adj. Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless.