Incompetent Quotes

War is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds. ~ John Steinbeck

Unhappy voters thought the anemic economy, Obamacare, the collapse of U.S. foreign policy, the scandals in government, and the incompetent handling of everything from the Islamic State to Ebola were the only real issues. Democrats'€ refusal to acknowledge them did not make these failures go away. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose. ~ Azar Nafisi

The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Now, no complaining, Waxillium. It will help. I've put the list in this little book," Steris said, producing a palm-sized notebook, "for ease of reference. Each page contains a conversation opener, indexed to the people it will likely work best upon. The numbers below list ways you could segue the conversation into useful areas and perhaps figure out what our targets are up to, and what their connection is to the Bands of Mourning."
"I'm not socially incompetent, Steris," Wax said. "I can make small talk."
"I know that," Steris said, "but I'd rather avoid an incident like the Cett party. ... "
"Which Cett party?"
"The one where you head-butted someone."
He cocked his head. "Oh, right. That smarmy little man with the ridiculous mustache. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Most of the members are positively corrupt, and the others are really singularly incompetent. ~ Edmund Morris

Problems often become worse if incompetent people try to solve them. ~ Eraldo Banovac

For many of us homemakers our greatest fear is in being found incompetent, insufficient, and ineffective. We prefer to look like we've got it all together. We give lip service to the idea that nobody's perfect, but we would rather die trying to prove that we're the exception to the rule. ~ Gloria Furman

One competent go-getter is worth One Hundred incompetent do-nothings. - Kailin Gow, On Hiring a Winning Team ~ Kailin Gow

The actual assertion that the Census Bureau could behave in such a way as to tilt things one way or the other way in the partisan sense, is, on the face of it, a silly charge. It's the same Census Bureau that's considered to be incompetent by some people, and then some of the same people are saying that this incompetent agency is so clever and so Machiavellian that it can design a census for partisan reasons. ~ Kenneth Prewitt

The gospel of Jesus Christ solves the innate problem we have of "glory greed." We are, every one of us from birth, incompetent thieves of the glory that belongs only to God. We know in our insidest insides that we fall short of his glory, and so we are constantly clawing and scratching to make up that difference in some way. This is how all sin is fundamentally idolatry and how all accumulations of worldly treasures - be they material goods or religious merit - are fundamentally acts of self-worship. Then in the gospel of Christ, God forgives our petty theft, sets us free from the bondage of our idols, and unites us Spiritually, irrevocably, and satisfyingly to himself. Now the glory we tried to steal is shared with us freely, and it is real glory this time, not these pathetic knockoffs we think will do the trick. ~ Jared C. Wilson

Lawyers are the first refuge of the incompetent. ~ Aaron Allston

An incompetent lawyer can delay a trial for months or years. A competent lawyer can delay one even longer. ~ Evelle J. Younger

For me, breastfeeding was even more painful than giving birth. And despite a lactation consultant, I felt incompetent. I forged on, barely sleeping, always either breastfeeding or pumping and never getting the hang of it. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard

God is either cruel or incompetent. ~ Woody Allen

You and many outstanding inventors and writers have striven for the ideal and have thereby helped yourself do remarkably well. REBT, therefore, does not oppose competition or striving for outstanding achievement. It advocates task-perfection, not self-perfection." "What does that mean?" "It means that you can try to be as good, or even as perfect, as you can - at any project or task. You can try to make it ideal. But you are not a good person if it is perfect. You are still a person who completed a perfect project, but never a good person for doing so." "How, then, do I become an incompetent or bad person?" "You don't! When you do incompetent or evil acts, you become a person who acted badly - never a bad person. ~ Albert Ellis

You missed with me so close? What? You failed your assassin training classes? Did you even bother to show up? Or are you just that incompetent? (Syn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

In his theory Perrow recognized that modern systems are made up of thousands of parts, including fallible human decision makers, which interrelate in ways that are, like Laplace´s atoms, impossible to track and anticipate individually. Yet one can bet on the fact that just as atoms executing a drunkard´s walk will eventually get somewhere, so too will accidents eventually occur. Called normal accident theory, Perrow´s doctrine describes how that happens – how accidents can occur without clear causes, without those glaring errors and incompetent villains sought by corporate or government commission. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

Our megatechnic culture, based as it is on the strange supposition that subjective malice has no reality and that evils do not exist, except in the sense of reparable mechanical defects, has proved itself incompetent to take on such responsibilities. ~ Lewis Mumford

Twentysomethings who don't feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed. ~ Meg Jay

How do you judge the professionals you patronize? Too many people judge them by display factors. Extra points are given to those who wear expensive clothes, drive luxury automobiles, and live in exclusive neighborhoods. They assume a professional is likely to be mediocre, even incompetent, if he lives in a modest home and drives a three-year-old Ford Crown Victoria. Very, very few people judge the quality of the professionals they use by net worth criteria. Many professionals have told us they must look successful to convince their customers/clients that they are. ~ Thomas J. Stanley

I was convinced that I was totally incompetent in predicting market prices - but that others were generally incompetent also but did not know it, or did not know they were taking massive risks. Most traders were just "picking pennies in front of a steamroller," exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it. ~ Nassem Nicholas Taleb

The thing is helicopters are different from airplanes An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or incompetent piloting, it will fly. ~ Harry Reasoner

They sat together at a table in the corner of a basement speakeasy, and they drank beer, and Mike related his favorite tale of how he had fallen five stories when a scaffolding gave way under him, how he had broken three ribs but lived to tell it, and Roark spoke of his days in the building trades. Mike did have a real name, which was Sean Xavier Donnigan, but everyone had forgotten it long ago; he owned a set of tools and an ancient Ford, and existed for the sole purpose of traveling around the country from one big construction job to another. People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects. ~ Ayn Rand

I like my friends at a functional enough level of mediocre to where I don't feel incompetent. ~ Veronica Larsen

[The myth of the absolutizing of ignorance] implies the existence of someone who decrees the ignorance of someone else. The one who is doing the decreeing defines himself and the class to which he belongs as those who know or were born to know; he thereby defines others as alien entities. The words of his own class come to be the "true" words, which he imposes or attempts to impose on the others: the oppressed, whose words have been stolen from them. Those who steal the words of others develop a deep doubt in the abilities of the others and consider them incompetent. Each time they say their word without hearing the word of those whom they have forbidden to speak, they grow more accustomed to power and acquire a taste for guiding, ordering, and commanding. They can no longer live without having someone to give orders to. Under these circumstances, dialogue is impossible. ~ Paulo Freire

My hands clench at my sides. I cannot adequately express how tickled I am to know that I wasted four years pursuing a business degree at Oregon State so I could scan and file papers while my incompetent twenty-four-year-old boss supervises. ~ Winter Renshaw

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh.

I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains.

Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing ~ Bill Maher

Just as violence is the last refuge of the inarticulate, so it is also the first resort of the incompetent, the easy out for the man who is capable of expressing himself only in the most primitive and vulgar of dramatic terms. He leaves us with only the obscenity of violence per se - and the pornographer thereof will always be with us, in film as in any other medium. And so will his audience. ~ Judith Crist

Constant complaints were being made of incompetent attendants, and some dozen women did double duty, and then were blamed for breaking down. If any hospital director fancies this a good and economical arrangement, allow one used up nurse to tell him it isn't, and beg him to spare the sisterhood, who sometimes, in their sympathy, forget that they are mortal, and run the risk of being made immortal, sooner than is agreeable to their partial friends. ~ Louisa May Alcott

A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the "cradle of Western civilization" remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories. ~ Thorsten J. Pattberg

Plague might be a social incompetent, but he was unquestionably a genius. ~ Stieg Larsson

I am an Imperial commissar. I will enflame the weak, support the wavering, guide the lost. I will be all things to all men who need me. But I will also punish without hesitation the incompetent, the cowardly, and the treasonous.
Ibram Gaunt ~ Dan Abnett

All baby clothes are adorable, whoever they're meant for (and in the end, of course, they're meant for the parents). All remind you of how vulnerable an infant is, how wholly incompetent and in need of adult largess. You don't look at blue clothes and think "strong" or pink clothes and think "fragile." You look at everything in these micromatized dimensions and think, "How precious! How ridiculous! What was evolution thinking of? ~ Natalie Angier

I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept. ~ Neil Gaiman

On the roads of failure, it is not uncommon to see the tears of the talented; and in the land of success, to hear the victorious screams of the incompetent! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I propose another explanation: The reason so many Americans have become alienated from government since the poll of 1964 is that government really has become more incompetent and really has become alienated from the public it is supposed to serve. Political cycles and political fashion have nothing to do with it. American government isn't what it used to be. ~ Charles Murray

Experiment: To replace negative character labels, try the following steps:

1. Pick a new, positive character label that you would prefer. For example, if your old belief is "I'm incompetent," you would likely pick "I'm competent."

2. Rate how much you currently believe the old negative character label on a scale of 0 (= I don't believe it at all) to 100 (= I believe it completely). Do the same for the new positive belief. For example, you might say you believe "I'm incompetent" at level 95 and believe "I'm competent" at level 10 (the numbers don't need to add up to 100).

3. Create a Positive Data Log and a Historical Data Log. Strengthening your new, positive character label is often a more helpful approach than attempting to hack away at the old, negative one. I'm going to give you two experiments that will help you do this.

Positive Data Log. For two weeks, commit to writing down evidence that supports your new, positive character belief. For example, if you are trying to boost your belief in the thought "I'm competent" and you show up to an appointment on time, you can write that down as evidence.

Don't fall into the cognitive trap of discounting some of the evidence. For example, if you make a mistake and then sort it out, it's evidence of competence, not incompetence, so you could put that in your Positive Data Log.

Historical Data Log. This log looks back at periods of your life and finds evidence from t ~ Alice Boyes

* Intelligence is quickness to learn. Ability is the skill to apply what is learned. Competence is the ability and the desire to apply what is learned. Desire is the attitude that makes a skillful person competent. Many skillful people are incompetent. Ability without the right attitude is wasted. ~ Shiv Khera

Here are the basic rules of LNTC, as I understood it:

Leave no evidence that you ever left the comfort of your bed to struggle through the woods with the sole intention of eating starch and beans and lying on your back on a rocky and downward-sloping campsite while you stare at the ceiling of your tent and listen to the sounds of a variety of carnivores as they rustle around outside. Leave no evidence that you are scared witless, that every movement terrifies you, even the most quiet scratching that you will realize in the morning must have been chipmunks. Leave no evidence that you are afraid you didn't dig your glory hole deep enough and that you used twice as much toilet paper as everyone else. Leave as little evidence as possible to indicate that you are the most incompetent camper to ever set foot on the trail.

Needless to say, it was my first time camping. ~ Erin Saldin

I look at Woody Allen's prolific career of 30 or 40 films, and I'm watching the clock. I'd love to work at a clip of a film a year. We don't get the benefit of the doubt, particularly black women. We're presumed incompetent, whereas a white male is assumed competent until proven otherwise. They just think the guy in the ball hat and the T-shirt over the thermal has got it, whether he's got it or not. For buzzy first films by a white male, the trajectory is a 90-degree angle. For us, it's a 30-degree angle. ~ Dee Rees

Our government has become incompetent, unresponsive, corrupt. And that incompetence, ineptitude, lack of accountability is now dangerous. ~ Carly Fiorina

Police internal affairs are in the business of protecting corrupt and incompetent police officers from prosecution due to the extensive range of laws that they have blatantly broken. ~ Steven Magee

Why did the generals who have been so ready to term me a complaisant and incompetent yes-man fail to secure my removal? Was that all that difficult? No, that wasn't it; the truth was that nobody would have been ready to replace me, because each one knew that he would end up just as much a wreck as I. ~ Wilhelm Keitel

Christian growth does not involve becoming stronger and stronger, more and more competent every day. It involves becoming more and more aware of how weak and incompetent we are and how strong and competent Jesus was and continues to be for us. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics. ~ Angela Carter

The incompetent always present thmeselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and teh feeble-minded as intellectual. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

She was furious, with the kind of fury peculiar to the nonpaying client. Those who can't afford private attorneys ... assumed legal aid was incompetent. Do-gooders were simply losers in disguise. ~ Laura Lippman

Let the gods distinguish between the wiched and the merely incompetent. ~ Glen Cook

I fear vastly more a futile, incompetent old age than I do any form of death. ~ William Allen White

No parents will in that future time have the right to burden society with a malformed or mentally incompetent child. ~ H. Bentley Glass

Other people's houses are right on top of this one," he said. "I think they could take one step and be in our living room."
"You haven't seen the courtyard yet, Gregori. The house opens up to a courtyard in the back, and it's immense and in quite good shape." Savannah began heading up the stairs, ignoring his grousing.
"I hate to think what you would call bad shape," he muttered as he followed her upstairs.
"I wonder why everything is so dusty," Savannah said. "I had the real estate people come in and clean and get things ready for our arrival."
"Do not touch anything," Gregori hissed softly, and very gently caught her shoulders to put her behind him.
"What is it?" Instinctively she lowered her voice and looked around, trying to see if there was some danger she had been unable to sense.
"If people came and made up the bed and prepared the house for your arrival, then they would have removed the dust too."
"Maybe they're incredibly incompetent," she suggested hopefully.
Gregori glanced at her and found the hard edge of his mouth softening. She was making him want to smile all the time, even in the most serious of situations. "I am certain any company would work overtime trying to make you happy, ma petite. I know I do."
She blushed at the memory of how he did so. "So why all the dust?" she asked, deliberately distracting him.
"I think Julian left us a message. You have remained with humans so long, you see only with your eyes." ~ Christine Feehan

Excuse is the tool of the incompetent. A monument of nothingness, and those that use it are not wise. ~ Paul Adefarasin

Wretched set of incompetent noodles. ~ Adam Hochschild

Investors are people with more money than time.
Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.
Startups are business experiments performed with other people's money.
Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it."
"Company culture is what goes without saying.
There are no real rules, only laws.
Success forgives all sins.
People who leak to you, leak about you.
Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.
Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.
Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.
Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.
Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player - investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer - is complicit. ~ Antonio García Martínez

A woman's heart is such a complex problem - the owner thereof is often most incompetent to find the solution to this puzzle. ~ Emmuska Orczy

Initial incompetence is not a reason to be dismissive of capabilities. Al Qaeda itself was incompetent when it started as a terrorist organization. And clearly it's gone from blowing themselves up to knocking down the World Trade Center. ~ Michael Scheuer

To the night version of her (mother) I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I'm sorry - whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren't, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all the children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don't do it myself, it won't get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane. And distrust. Just in general, distrust. Irony.
Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can't make a dent because I'm wearing irony. ~ Delia Ephron

I mean, I may not hold the record in cleaning house either, but if I've got old milk cartons that smell like maggots I bundle them up and put them out."
"I'm on a disability pension'" he said. "I'm socially incompetent. ~ Stieg Larsson

If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad. ~ Roger Ebert

It's a peculiar thing about liberals. When it comes to middle-class people who are fully capable of caring for themselves, liberals seek to undermine their independence in every way possible. With seductive 'entitlements' like guaranteed retirement, health care, nutrition, education, and jobs, liberals attempt to lure the middle class into dependence on the state. But when it comes to those who are truly incompetent, those whose mental afflictions render them unable to manage their lives at all, liberals are suddenly transformed into absolutists for personal autonomy. ~ Mona Charen

working more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive - and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot," Robinson writes. Further, more than a hundred years of research shows that "every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul." Really! Even though most people think this makes intuitive sense, they are still surprised to hear that it is actually true. This common sense is so widely ignored that overwork - and the problems with health, happiness, and productivity that it brings - is epidemic. ~ Christine Carter

If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life
production, politics, and education
rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden. ~ Emma Goldman

You might be surprised to know how many successful writers produced hopelessly incompetent first books. They were not wasting their time. They were learning their trade. ~ Anonymous

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: 'Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and programs, citizens and parliamentarians cannot make informed decisions and incompetent or corrupt governments can be hidden under a cloak of secrecy.'
When he became prime minister, his attitude appeared to undergo a shift of considerable proportions. It often took the Conservatives twice as long as previous governments to handle access requests. Sometimes it took six months to a year. ~ Lawrence Martin

Almost everybody we get together with about a matter, even if it is of the highest importance, is incompetent. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Decried every day as a feckless thing without initiative or ambition, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as private enterprise, government became that thing. First sequester its responsibilities, sell off its functions, grant it no respect; run it into the ground and then declare it incompetent. ~ Don Watson

Amateur comes from the Latin agent amatus. To love. Never worry about love. Love delivers. It's the incompetent professionals that'll screw you. ~ C.D. Reiss

Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading. ~ Northrop Frye

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée.

It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has so ~ Frank Kermode

Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life. ~ Carl Lotus Becker

Doctor: Have you considered that your health issues are in your head and you may need to see a psychiatrist? Patient (Silently): Have you considered that you are an incompetent that is in the wrong profession? ~ Steven Magee

there would always be incompetent assholes in the world ... and many of them would be in places of power. ~ Christopher G. Nuttall

To an incompetent judge I must not lie, but I may be silent; to a competent I must answer. ~ John Donne

To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

... your midthirties...is the age that women usually start to feel confident. Having finally left behind the...awfulness of your twenties...your thirties are the point where the good stuff kicks in...How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, gray hairs) that you've entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to...totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you... Lines and grayness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone--the equivalent of the yellow-and-black banding on a wasp...Lines are your weapons against the idiots. Lines are your 'KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN' sign. ~ Caitlin Moran

He was able to find the intensity and beauty that he wanted, in the plung itself. Physical forces in a complicated coalition of gravity, acceleration, and temperature were powerful and intense enough to satisfy him. It made sense. Nothing was as comforting as the enduring purity of elemental forces, and returning to them could not mean defeat. But he never thought that he would die in a bark suit, strapped to a shock pancake, next to an incompetent midget. ~ Mark Helprin

To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted ~ Philip Larkin

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

Rosenfeld went to work for the Herald Tribune after his graduation from Syracuse University and has always been an editor, never a reporter. He was inclined to worry that too many reporters on the metropolitan staff were incompetent, and thought even the best reporters could be saved from self-destruction only by the skills of an editor. His natural distrust of reporters was particularly acute on the Watergate story, where the risks were very great, and he was in the uncomfortable position of having to trust Bernstein and Woodward more than he had ever trusted any reporters.

-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward ~ Carl Bernstein

From a philosophical perspective, Linde's little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation. ~ Jim Holt

No matter how much someone may irritate me, I have no right to puff myself up with my own self-importance so as to declare that person to be absolutely incompetent, assuming a posture of disdain from my own position of false superiority. ~ Paulo Freire

It was a frightening thing, to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk musicians, who might any moment burst into song. ~ Bruce Sterling

Liberals go straight to ugly racist stereotypes when attacking conservative blacks, calling them oversexualized, stupid and/or incompetent. ~ Ann Coulter

Uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, often putting self (and reelection) before country - this was my view of the majority of the United States Congress. ~ Robert M. Gates

Neither this nation nor this party can afford a candidate so captive to the demands of the intolerant right that we end up re-electing a president of the incompetent left. ~ Arlen Specter

Fun is going to enhance interest, because people don't feel incompetent when they're having fun. ~ Matthew Richter

There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent. ~ Emile Durkheim

By looking after his relatives' interests as he did, Napoleon furthermore displayed incredible weakness on the purely human level. When a man occupies such a position, he should eliminate all his family feeling. Napoleon, on the contrary, placed his brothers and sisters in posts of command, and retained them in these posts even after they'd given proofs of their incapability. All that was necessary was to throw out all these patently incompetent relatives. Instead of that, he wore himself out with sending his brothers and sisters, regularly every month, letters containing reprimands and warnings, urging them to do this and not to do that, thinking he could remedy their incompetence by promising them money, or by threatening not to give them any more. Such illogical behaviour can be explained only by the feeling Corsicans have for their families, a feeling in which they resemble the Scots. By thus giving expression to his family feeling, Napoleon introduced a disruptive principle into his life. Nepotism, in fact, is the most formidable protection imaginable : the protection of the ego. But wherever it has appeared in the life of a State - the monarchies are the best proof - it has resulted in weakening and decay. Reason : it puts an end to the principle of effort.
In this respect, Frederick the Great showed himself superior to Napoleon - Frederick who, at the most difficult moments of his life, and when he had to take the hardest decisions, never forgot that things are ca ~ Adolf Hitler

Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her presence. As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone. A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws. That's what Kitty did. She kept lobbing the ball straight into the pocket of my glove, and when I threw the ball back to her, she hauled in everything that was even remotely in her area: jumping up to spear balls that soared above her head, diving nimbly to her left or right, charging in to make tumbling, shoestring catches. More than that, her skill was such that she always made me feel that I had made those bad throws on purpose, as if my only object had been to make the game more amusing. She made me seem better than I was, and that strengthened my confidence, which in turn helped to make my throws less difficult for her to handle. In other words, I started talking to her rather than to myself, and the pleasure of it was greater than anything I had experienced in a long time. ~ Paul Auster

To technical people, these seem like minor oversights that take only a minute to fix. "Oops. I forgot to change the server name to the production server." Or, "Oh, the new screens are there. I just forgot to link the button." But to users who are already feeling a bit skittish about trying out the new technology, these first impressions are a big deal. To you, these events probably seem inconsequential, carrying no inherent meaning, but to them it sets off major alarm bells. It signals things like, "This technology must be a sloppy piece of crap," and, "These IT people must be completely incompetent," and, "They must think I'm not important enough for them to check their work. ~ Paul Glen

The CIA is an incompetent bureaucracy, generally. ~ Robert Baer

That was you who hit me with the float? (Talon)
Yes. (Dionysus)
Damn, boy. You've fallen a long way down. Yesterday Greek god…today incompetent float driver. (Camulus) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Replace Negative Character Labels

Negative character labels are an even more serious problem than fixed mindsets. Examples of negative character labels include "I'm selfish," "I'm needy," "I'm unlovable," "I'm weak," "I'm defective," "I'm incompetent," and "I'm worthless." Such an uplifting list! Those negative beliefs sound quite dramatic when written down on the page, and sometimes people don't realize that they hold those beliefs about themselves. If your immediate reaction is to say, "Oh, I don't think any of those things about myself" or "Only someone who was super depressed would think those things," then take an extra second to make sure you're not even partially buying into these types of thoughts about yourself. It might be that you believe a negative character label only 20% of the time, but even that can still be an issue.
There are two types of negative character labels. Both can be changed. One type is very stable. For example, you believe you are incompetent, and you have never believed anything else, not even when you are in a positive mood. The other type is the type that goes up and down with your mood, anxiety, and stress. When your mood is low, you believe the negative character label much more strongly than when your mood is positive. If your negative character label changes due to transient things like your mood, anxiety, or stress, this can help you start to see that the belief is a product of these things rather than true. ~ Alice Boyes

Another interesting aspect of the gender war that most women forget is that their thoughts and judgments about men impact the way men behave around them. If you believe your thoughts reside exclusively in the privacy of your mind, think again. Your thoughts are palpable and resonate with others. If you judge someone as incompetent, insensitive, or stupid, they feel it. This includes men.
Some people are more skillful at noticing and naming this type of energy, but everyone is affected by it. Whether you like it or not, you have an impact on how people, especially men, behave around you. Your ideas, thoughts, and beliefs about people influence how they treat you. Perception is an act of creation. Thinking all men are generally stupid, untrustworthy, insensitive, or chauvinistic will actually push them to behave in those ways toward you. It's as though you are nudging them in that direction and then get to say, "See! Look - I'm right. All men do suck. ~ Marie Forleo

Where would I be had I not believed I was incompetent? ~ Ilona Mialik

[O]nly Colonel Lanser knew what war really is in the long run . . . and he tried not to think what he knew--that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for a new weariness and new hatreds. ~ John Steinbeck

I do not support peace in the Middle East. And I do not support Arafat. He is a stupid, incompetent fool! ~ Muammar Al-Gaddafi

Great, the English had sent her to her death accompanied by two village idiots. Not that it mattered anymore how her life ended, but she did take slight offense at the fact that her security team was chosen from among the incompetent. ~ E.B. Brown