Competent Quotes - Page 7

• The competent leader of men cares little for the niceties of other peoples' characters: he cares much--everything--for the exterior uses to which they may be put.... These are men to be moved. How should he move them? He supplies the power; others simply the materials on which that power operates.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Moving, Character, Men

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• Almost everywhere we find . . . the use of various coercive measures, to rid ourselves as quickly as possible of the child withinus--i.e., the weak, helpless, dependent creature--in order to become an independent competent adult deserving of respect. When we reencounter this creature in our children, we persecute it with the same measures once used in ourselves.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Independent, Order

  Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.58, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Memories, Memorable, Heart

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.637, Simon and Schuster

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• A railroad may have to be carried over a gorge or arroya. Obviously it does not need an Engineer to point out that this may be done by filling the chasm with earth, but only a Bridge Engineer is competent to determine whether it is cheaper to do this or to bridge it, and to design the bridge which will safely and most cheaply serve.

  Henry R. Towne

  Bridges, Design, Doe

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• I am afraid if there is anything to be afraid of. A precipice cannot hurt you. Lions and tigers can. The streets of New York I consider more dangerous than the Matterhorn to a thoroughly competent and careful climber.

  Annie Smith Peck

  Hurt, New York, Mountain

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• There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

  Jacques Derrida

  Memories, Philosophy, Reading

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• The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children's adaptive capacity.

  David Elkind

  Sports, Children, Taken

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• Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.

  David Elkind

  Children, Believe, Responsibility

  David Elkind (2009). “Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance”, p.119, Harvard University Press

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• As for mathematicians themselves: don't expect too much help. Most of them are too far removed in their ivory towers to take up such challenges. And anyway, they are not competent. After all, they are just mathematicians-what we need is paramathematicians, like you... It is you who can be the welding force, between mathematicians and stories, in order to achieve the synthesis.

  Apostolos Doxiadis

  Science, Order, Ivory Tower

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• To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power. Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o'clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve. And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth.

  Brenda Ueland

  Morning, Horse, Jobs

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• All preceptors should have that kind of genius described by Tacitus, "equal to their business, but not above it;" a patient industry, with competent erudition; a mind depending more on its correctness than its originality, and on its memory rather than on its invention.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Memories, Teaching, Should Have

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.161

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• Having talent isn't merely about being competent; confidence is actually a part of that talent.

  Claire Shipman

  Confidence, Talent

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• The result of the revolution in Germany has been to establish a democracy in the best sense of the word.  We are steering towards an order of things guaranteeing a process of a natural and reasonable selection in the domain of political leadership, thanks to which that leadership will be entrusted to the most competent, irrespective of their descent, name or fortune.  The memorable words of the great Corsican that every soldier carries a Field Marshal's baton in his knapsack, will find its political complement in Germany.

  Adolf Hitler

  Memorable, Order, Names

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• The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isnt really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.

  Barry Eisler

  Quality, Want, Argument

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• Socialists believe otherwise - a man is not competent enough to make decision should he use seatbelt, should he buy insurance, and the same man is competent enough to elect president and government.

  Janusz Korwin-Mikke

  Believe, Men, Decision

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• History teaches us that a given view has been abandoned in favor of another by all men, or by all competent men, or perhaps by only the most vocal men; it does not teach us whether the change was sound or whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected. Only an impartial analysis of the view in question, an analysis that is not dazzled by the victory or stunned by the defeat of the adherents of the view concerned - could teach us anything regarding the worth of the view and hence regarding the meaning of the historical change.

  Leo Strauss

  Men, Views, Historical

  "Natural Right and History". Book by Leo Strauss, 1953.

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• A good landscape painting is not just a demonstration of competent application of paint. It must offer a feeling of homage to the subject.

  Keith Shackleton

  Feelings, Landscape Painting, Demonstration

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• About First Landing by Robert Zubrin: Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.

  James Nicoll

  People, Stories, Mars

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• In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Mean, Doe, Minorities

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• Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Book, Judging, Criticise

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Stuart Blackie (1883). “The Wisdom of Goethe”, Edinburgh, W. Blackwood

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• The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.
  But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people positively do not want to be "done good" by the humanitarian. Of course, what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.

  Isabel Paterson

  Men, Thinking, Order

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• 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.

  Bill Wyman

  Song, Ideas, People

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• One might feel indignant at the injustice which deals out what is called fame with so unequal a hand, were it not for the reflection that men who are competent to add to the intellectual wealth of the world, and enlarge the domain of knowledge, have learned to take popular applause at its true value, and to find in the faithful discharge of honorable duty a satisfaction which is its own reward.

  George Stillman Hillard

  Men, Reflection, Hands

  George Stillman Hillard (1864). “Life and Campaigns of George B. McClellan, Major-general U. S. Army”, p.41, Gale Cengage Learning

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• Not everyone in an organization is in a position to accumulate power through competent performance because most people are just carrying out the ordinary and the expected - even if they do it very well. The extent to which a job is routinized fails to give an advantage to anyone doing it because 'success' is seen as inherent in the very establishment of the position and the organization surrounding it. Neither persons nor organizations get 'credit' for doing the mandatory or the expected.

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  Jobs, Work, Organization

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• The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.

  Bill Brandt

  Photographer, Produce, Distinction

  Bill Brandt (1993). “Bill Brandt: Selected Texts & Bibliography”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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