These incompetence quotes will inspire you. Incompetence is the state or fact of being incompetent or inability to do something successfully; ineptitude.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging incompetence quotes, incompetence sayings, and incompetence proverbs.
Best Incompetence Quotes
- “There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence.” ~ Bob Herbert
- “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 - “The problem with incompetence is its inability to recognize itself.” ~ Orrin Woodward
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“Incompetence is the true crisis.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “When success and incompetence meet, disaster is not far away.” ~ Robert Kiyosaki
- “Incompetence is often highly regarded in governmental circles.” ~ William Wallace
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“Our government has become incompetent, unresponsive, corrupt. And that incompetence, ineptitude, lack of accountability is now dangerous.” ~ Carly Fiorina
- “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
- “Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “Always assume incompetence before looking for conspiracy.” ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
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“It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “In an age of incompetence, I’ve been able to last in this crazy business. I actually know how to play my ax and write a song. That’s my job.” ~ Billy Joel
- “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 are self-serving.” ~ John Stossel
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“A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.” ~ Bruce Catton
- “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” ~ Isaac Asimov
- “Secrecy breeds incompetence because where there is failure, failure is kept secret.” ~ Julian Assange
- “The price of loyalty is incompetence.” ~ Jonathan Alter
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“Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell
- “I don’t know what I’m doing, but my incompetence has never stopped my enthusiasm.” ~ Woody Allen
- “One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.” ~ Kim Stanley Robinson
- “It happens; incompetence is rewarded more often than not.” ~ Jeff Lindsay
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“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.” ~ James C. Collins
- “…because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.” ~ Peter Drucker
- “One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “Incompetence is a double-edged banana.” ~ John Perry Barlow
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“Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell
- “Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure to hide the flavor of their own incompetence.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “I believe email-based status reports are the clearest and best signs of managerial incompetence and laziness.” ~ Rands
- “Just as your hand has the power to hide the sun, mediocrity has the power to hide your inner light. Do not blame others for your own incompetence.” ~ Paulo Coelho
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“Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “I have little tolerance for incompetence, sloppy thinking, and laziness.” ~ Michael E. DeBakey
- “Carelessness with details sinks more careers than anyone will admit.” ~ Lois Wyse
- “If at first, you don’t succeed, you may be at your level of incompetence already.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
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“I am, as I’ve said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.” ~ Billy Joel
- “I’m sure it’s very obvious . . . how upset I am with incompetence and the lack of common sense in life. If I can sum up the reason . . . it’s that these characteristics are not benign. They are responsible for much, if not most, of the great problems, misery, and injustice in the world.” ~ Vincent Bugliosi
- “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
- “Luck is always the last refuge of laziness and incompetence.” ~ James Cash Penney
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“Inconsistency, incompetence, and lies are all cut short by the ground. It will stop you if you can’t stop yourself.” ~ Mark Twight
- “Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.” ~ Soong May-ling
- “Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “A bad workman quarrels with the man who calls him that.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
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“Sometimes incompetence is useful. It helps you keep an open mind.” ~ Roberto Cavalli
- “Why do we love the idea that people might be secretly working together to control and organise the world? Because we don’t like to face the fact that our world runs on a combination of chaos, incompetence and confusion.” ~ Jonathan Cainer
- “The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects – his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.” ~ Henry Hazlitt
- “I believe in discipline. You can forgive incompetence. You can forgive lack of ability. But one thing you cannot ever forgive is lack of discipline.” ~ Forrest Gregg
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“Government failure is always used as an excuse for government expansion. Government thrives on crisis and incompetence.” ~ Jim Babka
- “Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No sirree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it’s a lethal cocktail.” ~ Graydon Carter
- “A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma.” ~ Marlene Dietrich
- “The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence.” ~ Elbert Hubbard
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“Man cannot live by incompetence alone.” ~ Charlotte Whitton
- “Evil is a form of incompetence.” ~ Alan Bullock
- “Even though . . . 9/11 happened because . . . Bush’s FBI and CIA did not detect the Al Qaeda conspiracy . . . , Bush not only failed to apologize to the nation or the victims’ survivors, he demonstrated his total lack of leadership by refusing to fire or even criticize those in these agencies who, like Bush, let this nation down. As in private life, to stimulate excellence, good performances have to be rewarded and gross negligence and incompetence punished.” ~ Vincent Bugliosi
- “Men now monopolize the upper levels… depriving women of their rightful share of opportunities for incompetence.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “The problem that we have is the President himself- a President who prides himself on his own weakness and incompetence and whose love of false prophets and strange women knows no bounds and has no end. A President who is as confused and as clueless as the comic character called Chancey Gardner in the celebrated 1970’s Peter Seller’s Hollywood blockbuster titled ”Being There” ~ Femi Fani-Kayode
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“Seeming failure is not of the law of satyagraha but of incompetence of the satyagrahi by whatever cause induced.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “It seems that the problem with government as an institution is uniformly bad, worldwide. It may be the ONLY thing that binds all nations together – the incompetence of all of their governments…The unions are the mafia, which is the CIA, which is the Catholic Church, which is the government, which is what’s the difference? It’s corrupt! It’s the same guys pulling these strings, you know? One day he pulls the string and this lamp comes out, the next say he pulls the string and there’s a missile coming out.” ~ Frank Zappa
- “Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “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
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“The way I understand it, the Russians are sort of a combination of evil and incompetence… sort of like the Post Office with tanks.” ~ Emo Philips
- “On females officiating in the NBA -Incompetence should not be confined to one sex.” ~ Bill Russell
- “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
- “O thrice unhappy home Whose master doesn’t know the difference between a watt and an ohm!” ~ Ogden Nash
- “Peter’s Principle: In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetence.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
