Unconscious Incompetence Quotes

There are things that we know, and there are things that we don't know. Then there are the things that we don't even know that we don't know. Those are the things that are the hardest.

The awful thing is that you can never be aware of what you are not aware of.

When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It's only painful and difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

The tragedy of ignorance is its complacency.

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.

...but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.

I never thought that I couldn't do what I set out to do. It wasn't from arrogance; it was from ignorance.

There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

We were ignorant, and we were ignorant of the fact that we were ignorant. That is ignorance squared, and it can lead to disaster.

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it…. Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

To be ignorant of one's own ignorance is to be in an unprogressive, uninspired state of existence.

Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter.

The greatest fault is to be conscious of none.

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.

Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.