“In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. Do not be fooled by apparent exceptions.”

— Laurence J. Peter

Source: The Peter Principle (1969), p. 36 cited in: James Ike Schaap (2011)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

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Laurence J. Peter 26

Canadian eductor 1919–1990

Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) Canadian eductor

Source: The Peter Principle (1969), p. 25: Statement of the Peter Principle

“All economic activity is carried out through time. Every individual economic process occupies a certain time, and all linkages between economic processes necessarily involve longer or shorter periods of time.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"Intertemporal Price Equilibrium and Movement in the Value of Money" (1928)
1920s–1930s

“I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

LKML, April 21, 2006 http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/0aff8e90a185c176
2000s, 2006

“Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.”

Glenn Greenwald (1967) American journalist, lawyer and writer

No Place to Hide (2014)
Source: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
Context: Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name. [... ] Conversely, the presumption is that the government, with rare exceptions, will not know anything that law-abiding citizens are doing. [... ] Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 209.

“It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", p. 13.

“The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 34

“I do not support peace in the Middle East. And I do not support Arafat. He is a stupid, incompetent fool!… The stupid fool is a zealot, a warrior, and a clever one. But he doesn't accomplish anything.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Remarks quoted in Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (1987) by Ion Mihai Pacepa, p. 110

“This is not a promise, this is a duty which I have to carry out.”

Serzh Sargsyan (1954) Armenian politician, 3rd President of Armenia

Daily Motivational Quotes http://pkquotes.blogspot.com/2008/07/this-is-not-promise-this-is.html (March 6. 2008)

“Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase

“Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Post, Linux kernel mailing list, 2000-05-02, Google Groups, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fa.linux.kernel/iQtWFALi4JA/eSzv64_tOvoJ,
2000s, 2000-04

“In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. Do not be fooled by apparent exceptions.”

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Laurence J. Peter 26

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