Quotes about underestimate

A collection of quotes on the topic of underestimate, power, people, doing.

Quotes about underestimate

José Baroja photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Douglas Adams photo
Andrew S. Tanenbaum photo

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

Computer Networks, 3rd ed., p. 83. (paraphrasing Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, University of Toronto Computing Services (UTCS) circa 1985)

Alice Munro photo
Bill Gates photo
Mario Puzo photo
T. Harv Eker photo
Wayne W. Dyer photo
Adele (singer) photo
Adolfo Bioy Casares photo

“The world attributes its misfortunes to the schemes and plottings of the very evil and powerful. I think stupidity is underestimated.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) Argentine novelist

"El mundo atribuye sus infortunios a las conspiraciones y maquinaciones de grandes malvados. Entiendo que se subestima la estupidez."
Breve diccionario del argentino exquisito, 1978.

Taylor Swift photo
Pope Francis photo
Ozzy Osbourne photo
Theodore Roosevelt photo
Theodore Roosevelt photo

“I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends; but I rank dividends below human character.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: I believe in shaping the ends of government to protect property as well as human welfare. Normally, and in the long run, the ends are the same; but whenever the alternative must be faced, I am for men and not for property, as you were in the Civil War. I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends; but I rank dividends below human character. Again, I do not have any sympathy with the reformer who says he does not care for dividends. Of course, economic welfare is necessary, for a man must pull his own weight and be able to support his family. I know well that the reformers must not bring upon the people economic ruin, or the reforms themselves will go down in the ruin. But we must be ready to face temporary disaster, whether or not brought on by those who will war against us to the knife. Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.

Marcin Malek photo
Derek Landy photo

“I try not to underestimate my opponents, no matter how ridiculous their beards.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

Ken Robinson photo
Orson Scott Card photo

“You underestimate yourself.”

Ender's Shadow

James Patterson photo

“Never underestimate the power of funny, it moves mountains.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Fang

Roald Dahl photo

“You're problem is, you underestimate me because I'm a woman.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Tom Robbins photo
Mark Millar photo
Karen Marie Moning photo

“Never underestimate a well-dressed bimbo.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Orson Scott Card photo
Augusten Burroughs photo
Sophie Kinsella photo
Janet Evanovich photo
Scott Lynch photo

“There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.”

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006), Chapter 4 “At the Court of Capa Barsavi” section 5 (p. 219)

Suzanne Collins photo
Jane Austen photo

“Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”

Source: Persuasion

Leo Buscaglia photo

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

LOVE (1972)
Variant: Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest accomplishment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

Marya Hornbacher photo
Sigmund Freud photo

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

Man kann sich des Eindrucks nicht erwehren, daß die Menschen gemeinhin mit falschen Maßstäben messen, Macht, Erfolg und Reichtum für sich anstreben und bei anderen bewundern, die wahren Werte des Lebens aber unterschätzen.
Source: 1920s, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Ch. 1, as translated by James Strachey, p.25

Cory Doctorow photo
Neil Simon photo
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Karen Joy Fowler photo
Suzanne Collins photo

“Never underestimate the power of a brillian stylist.”

Source: Mockingjay

Augusten Burroughs photo
Melissa de la Cruz photo

“It's always good to be underestimated.”

Melissa de la Cruz (1971) American writer

Source: Lost in Time

Carolyn Mackler photo

“Never underestimate yourself”

Carolyn Mackler (1973) American writer

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

Daniel Kahneman photo
Markus Zusak photo

“Never underestimate your dumbness!”

Never Underestimate Your Dumbness

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo

“Never underestimate a backwoods Cajun in a fight, old man.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infamous

Rick Riordan photo

“Don't underestimate Camp Half-Blood.”

Source: The Mark of Athena

H.L. Mencken photo

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

'Notes On Journalism' http://books.google.com/books?id=52L2eI9mwlcC&q="No+one+in+this+world+so+far+as+I+know+and+I+have+searched+the+record+for+years+and+employed+agents+to+help+me+has+ever+lost+money+by+underestimating+the+intelligence+of+the+great+masses+of+the+plain+people"&pg=PA28#v=onepage in the Chicago Tribune ( 19 September 1926 http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1926/09/19/page/87/article/notes-on-journalism)
The first sentence is often paraphrased as "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." (The Yale Book of Quotations, 2006, p. 512)
1920s
Source: Gist of Mencken

“A very underestimated part of the world, The Entrance is.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: The Piper's Son

A.A. Milne photo
Lauryn Hill photo
Robert Maynard Hutchins photo
Dan Savage photo

“No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer.”

Source: Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2002), p. 216

“But like Marx, Veblen badly underestimated the capacity of a democratic system to correct its own excesses.”

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VIII, Thorstein Veblen, p. 233

Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford photo

“We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

“Let us never underestimate the motivational force that the belief in Scripture’s divine proximity has upon exegetes. They open the book having already invested their faith in the proposition that it is underwritten by God.”

Jacques Berlinerblau (1966) Associate Professor, Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service,…

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 67

Eduardo Torroja photo
Joe Biden photo

“In this country, the number of individuals on the government payroll certainly underestimates the importance of government.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 1, Introduction, p. 10

John Allen Paulos photo
Peter Medawar photo
Sigmund Freud photo

“I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (25 March 1898)
1890s

Jack Johnson (musician) photo
Chris Anderson photo

“Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory.”

Source: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Ch. 5, p. 58

Vasily Chuikov photo
Franz Halder photo

“The Russian colossus…has been underestimated by us…whenever a dozen divisions are destroyed the Russians replace them with another dozen.”

Franz Halder (1884–1972) German general

August 1941, from "The World at War" - Page 129 - by Mark Arnold-Forster - World War, 1939-1945 - 1981
Sourced Encyclopedia of the Third Reich Louis L. Snyder

Harriet Harman photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo

“Perfidy and brutal force thwarted opportunities for calling President Wilson’s Arbitral Award to life. Nevertheless, its significance is not to be underestimated: through that decision the aspiration of the Armenian people for the lost Motherland had obtained vital and legal force.”

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

Address of President Serzh Sargsyan to the Conference dedicated to the 90th Anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s Arbitral Award http://www.president.am/events/news/eng/?pn=14&id=1316 (November 23, 2010)

Fernando J. Corbató photo

“Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

Source: On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991), p. 75

Allen C. Guelzo photo

“You underestimate the ability of people to act like idiots.”

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Relatives (1973)., Chapter 8 (p. 128).

Ai Weiwei photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“Peace has an economic foundation to which too little attention has been given. No student can doubt that it was to a large extent the economic condition of Europe that drove those overburdened countries headlong into the World War. They were engaged in maintaining competitive armaments. If one country laid the keel of one warship, some other country considered it necessary to lay the keel of two warships. If one country enrolled a regiment, some other country enrolled three regiments. Whole peoples were armed and drilled and trained to the detriment of their industrial life, and charged and taxed and assessed until the burden could no longer be borne. Nations cracked under the load and sought relief from the intolerable pressure by pillaging each other. It was to avoid a repetition of such a catastrophe that our Government proposed and brought to a successful conclusion the Washing- ton Conference for the Limitation of Naval Armaments. We have been altogether desirous of an extension of this principle and for that purpose have sent our delegates to a preliminary conference of nations now sitting at Geneva. Out of that conference we expect some practical results. We believe that other nations ought to join with us in laying aside their suspicions and hatreds sufficiently to agree among themselves upon methods of mutual relief from the necessity of the maintenance of great land and sea forces. This can not be done if we constantly have in mind the resort to war for the redress of wrongs and the enforcement of rights. Europe has the League of Nations. That ought to be able to provide those countries with certain political guaranties which our country does not require. Besides this there is the World Court, which can certainly be used for the determination of all justifiable disputes. We should not underestimate the difficulties of European nations, nor fail to extend to them the highest degree of patience and the most sympathetic consideration. But we can not fail to assert our conviction that they are in great need of further limitation of armaments and our determination to lend them every assistance in the solution of their problems. We have entered the conference with the utmost good faith on our part and in the sincere belief that it represents the utmost good faith on their part. We want to see the problems that are there presented stripped of all technicalities and met and solved in a way that will secure practical results. We stand ready to give our support to every effort that is made in that direction.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

Tommy Douglas photo
Warren Farrell photo
John P. Kotter photo

“Never underestimate the power of a good story.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 3, p. 80
The Heart of Change, (2002)

Theodore Dalrymple photo
Conrad Black photo

“Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated – unfairly so, in my opinion.”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

On avarice
"The world according to Conrad Black", 2007

Clarence Thomas photo

“Though being underestimated has its advantages, the stench of racial inferiority still confounds my olfactory nerves.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

“When all else fails, be willing to look like a fool. Maybe they will underestimate you later about something really important.”

Sarah Zettel (1966) American writer

Source: Bitter Angels (2009), Chapter 9 (p. 124)

Ben Carson photo

“Do not underestimate the importance of feeling special.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 61

Leo Buscaglia photo
Göran Persson photo

“Bush is underestimated in Europe and he is a skilled politician, even though we don't like his policies.”

Göran Persson (1949) Swedish politician, Swedish Social Democratic Party, thirty-second Prime minister of Sweden

Said about U.S. President George W. Bush and quoted in the Swedish newspaper Expressen (November 2, 2004).

Bertram Ramsay photo

“Our task in conjunction with the Merchant Navies of the United Nations, and supported by the Allied Air Forces, is to carry the Allied Expeditionary Force to the Continent, to establish it there in a secure bridgehead and to build it up and maintain it at a rate which will outmatch that of the enemy. Let no one underestimate the magnitude of this task.”

Bertram Ramsay (1883–1945) Royal Navy admiral

Special Order of the Day http://heritagecalling.com/2014/06/04/70-years-on-the-remains-of-operation-neptune/, 31 May 1944 by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay KCB, KBE, MVO, Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief, Operation Neptune