Professional Incompetence Quotes

Now I have never met a group of people who hate music more than professional roadies, and it is clearly obvious that 99.9 percent of them know nothing at all about music. Nothing. I find this to be quite strange, really. It's like someone who works in a bakery knowing nothing about baking.

Lawyers are the first refuge of the incompetent.

He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone.

If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.

Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don't know how to do their jobs. "I don't know how to sell this," they explain, frowning, as though it's your fault. "I don't know how to package this. I don't know what the market is for this book. I don't know how we're going to draw attention to this." In most occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.

Representatives of the American intelligence agencies - and I hope they won't be angry - but they could have been more professional, and the diplomats as well. After they found out that he was flying to us, and that he was flying as a transit passenger, there was pressure from all sides - from the Americans, from the Europeans - instead of just letting him go to a country where they could operate easily.

The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.

Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have ever handled.

There are three sorts of lawyers - able, unable and lamentable.

Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.

For all of you out there who don't know what 'ignoramus' is, it's an ignorant lawyer.

The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes.

There may be said to be three sorts of lawyers, able, unable, and lamentable.

The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.