Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people.
A. A. Gill
Lawyers are the first refuge of the incompetent.
Aaron Allston
When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
Aaron Sorkin
Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness - and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.
Adam Grant
I esteem it the crowning mercy of my life that not only the chief ends I contemplated on becoming a missionary are attained, but I am allowed to see competent, faithful, and affectionate successors actively engaged in the work.
Adoniram Judson
To handle the economy and services in a country like Iraq requires delegation of authority and the choice of competent people.
Ahmed Chalabi
The fact remains that I am a very artless and incompetent writer.
Akshaye Khanna
As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again.
Albert Murray
The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.
I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
Alexandra Petri
The wastefulness of indiscriminate plunder impoverishes a country, while it adds nothing to the support of the army; policy, as well as humanity to the inhabitants, dictates that all levies should be made according to established rules, and under the charge of discreet and competent officers.
Ambrose Burnside
People judge you really quickly, at first just on your facial features. There are two dimensions - warmth and competence. You can think of them as trustworthiness and strength. They're first judging you on warmth; evaluating whether or not you are trustworthy. That's much more important to them than whether or not you're competent.
Amy Cuddy
I feel incompetent to perform duties... which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me.
Andrew Johnson
When you've got a lot of slaves at your command, you tend to get a little bit fat. You tend to get a little bit lazy. You tend to get a little incompetent because there's not much that you do for yourself anymore.
Andrew Nikiforuk
There's this really awesome theory of human motivation - that human beings all want three things. One is to be competent, one is to belong, and one is be free, as in to have choice: to not be told what to do but to choose what to do.
Angela Duckworth
I am not a natural dancer, not even a half way competent dancer.
Ann Widdecombe
Most people are fed up to the back teeth with the never-ending wrangle over Brexit. All they want is for a competent government to get on with it and deliver a great deal for everyone in the U.K.
Anna Soubry
Even a competent lawyer may not be able to mount an adequate defense against the state, with all its resources, if he has next to nothing for investigation and effectively works for starvation wages.
Anthony Lewis
America does not need gorgeous halls and concert rooms for its musical development, but music schools with competent teachers, and many, very many, free scholarships for talented young disciples who are unable to pay the expense of study.
Anton Seidl
You can fake a lot in a startup these days, what with Amazon Web Services and all sorts of off-the-shelf back-end components that let any even minimally competent duffer set up a Web app that does something. Intelligent planning for growth is rare among early startups, but it's the name of the game at a large, rapidly scaling tech company.
Antonio Garcia Martinez
It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.
Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about.
The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isn't really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.
President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country.
Despite the fact that he has run the most incompetent administration in history, President Obama remains a solid bet for re-election in 2012. Obama's frontrunner status springs from two crucial facts: first, by overexposing himself in the public eye, he has made himself larger than life; second, the Republican field is pathetically weak.
I am constitutionally competent to contest the elections.
Besides, I'm fairly incompetent. I can't play that fast.
Lyon is unusual and seems to be exceptionally incompetent at publicising itself. In fact, it doesn't want visitors. It fears discovery.
If you are any competent musician, if you have creative ideas, ideas of songs, of arrangements, in a band like the Stones, where these 2 people do all the things, there is no freedom.
I am, as I've said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.
I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary.
A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn't use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph.
The vast majority of Secret Service agents are incredibly competent people.
Barkley was the first of many American skyjackers whose primary interest was money; by 1972, the majority of the nation's hijackings would involve demands for ransom. Barkley himself was declared incompetent to stand trial in November 1971, at which point he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Georgia.
Puerto Ricans are so well educated, they're so capable, they're so competent, but due to a lack of opportunity, when you graduate from college, you leave. Puerto Rico's number one export is human beings; Puerto Ricans!
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.
It's the way tenure works, together with dismissal protections that tenured teachers have, that no other public employee has, which makes it almost impossible to remove a grossly ineffective and incompetent teacher or, in some cases, even an abusive teacher.
Put together, what we want is a system that supports, protects, and properly pays good teachers and makes it possible in a responsible and fair way to remove teachers judged to be incompetent or abusive - that's it.
We are angry about paying the highest income taxes and property taxes in the nation and getting less and less for it. We are angry about our incompetent, dysfunctional government that pays no attention to the desires of the people. We are angry about the cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interests and self-dealing that is Albany.
The children of less effective, less competent parents will be more likely to adopt the customs and values of the peer group.
The students I have come in contact with at Harvard are highly competent individuals who prefer to be challenged and respond well to encouragement.
There is one group that is more consistently portrayed as ineffectual, as unvirtuous, as incompetent, as objects of fun, and that is white working class guys.
Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do it in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.
Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.
You come across words all the time that are everyday sexism. I was described as 'competently bossy' and 'bossily competent' by a male journalist, and I thought, 'Gosh, 'bossy' is never used of a man.'
Christine and I haven't raised our children. A whole community of selfless Christians has contributed to helping them become faithful, competent adults.
At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.
If people are failing, they look inept. If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.' Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.
In so many areas of life, I'm a spaz and incompetent.
As parents, we teach our kids about things we feel competent in. That's why so many parents don't teach their kids about money.
