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 unneccessary.
Ayn Rand
The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, cooperation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs.... He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.
James Grover Thurber
In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter
Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
Laurence J. Peter
Today's family is built like a pyramid with all the intrafamilial rivalries, tensions, jealousies, angers, hatreds, loves and needs focused on the untrained, vulnerable, insecure, young, inexperienced and incompetent parental apex ... about whose incompetence our vaunted educational system does nothing.
Lawrence Kubie
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