Our Current Candidates

Sunday, September 20, 2015 – Our Current Candidates

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. ~ Laurence J. Peter

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare. ~ Daniel P. Moynihan

To many a man, and sometimes to a youth, there comes the opportunity to choose between honorable competence and tainted wealth. The young man who starts out to be poor and honorable, holds in his hand one of the strongest elements of success. ~ Orison Swett Marden

You can’t fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal. ~ Doug Coupland

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. ~ Isaac Asimov

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

It is a good idea to “shop around” before you settle on a doctor. Ask about the condition of his Mercedes. Ask about the competence of his mechanic. Don’t be shy! After all, you’re paying for it. ~ Dave Barry

I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend. ~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

I would rather have a competent extremist than an incompetent moderate. ~ Leon Jaworski

Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace. ~ Frederick W. Taylor

I am, as I’ve said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary. ~ Billy Joel

Man cannot live by incompetence alone. ~ Charlotte Whitton

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

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

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. ~ Laurence J. Peter

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

If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation. ~ Vaclav Havel

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which. ~ Douglas Adams

The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity. ~ Quentin Crisp

Obscurity and competence – that is the life that is best worth living. ~ Mark Twain

Accomplishment is socially judged by ill-defined criteria so that one has to rely on others to find out how one is doing. ~ Albert Bandura

I look upon another’s insistence on the merits of his or her life – duties, intellect, accomplishment – and see that most of it is nonsense. ~ Harold Brodkey

My most important professional accomplishment to date is the ability to keep working with absolutely no skills whatsoever. ~ Colin Mochrie

I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

My reputation grows with every failure. ~ George Bernard Shaw

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. ~ Quentin Crisp

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure. ~ Oscar Wilde

Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flamethrower. ~ Bruce Feirstein

One cannot accomplish anything without fanaticism. ~ Evita Peron

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog. ~ Joseph Conrad

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper. ~ Khalil Gibran

There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can’t tell the truth without lying. ~ Josh Billings

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive. ~ Eliza Cook

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise. ~ Eric Hoffer

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far. ~ Muhammad Ali

I am no more humble than my talents require. ~ Oscar Levant

The humble and meek are thirsting for blood. ~ Joe Orton

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades – that of government. ~ Socrates

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth. ~ Jonathan Swift

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. ~ Tom Robbins

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes along. ~ Samuel Butler

Experience is what allows us to repeat our mistakes, only with more finesse, ~ Derwood Fincher

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept. [Nam in omnibus fere minus valent praecepta quam experimenta.] ~ Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria (II, 5, 5)

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. ~ Douglas Adams

Experience teaches only the teachable. ~ Aldous Huxley

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done. ~ Peter Ustinov