Quotes About Expertise

We are all experts and sometimes encounter limits in our fields, including those we call fools. Even the doctor can only heal the sick, but not raise the dead.

We only need a mediator when we lack knowledge of the matter in question.

It's hard not to act like you know it all when you do.

When people whom trouble is not a problem find themselves in a predicament, they are woefully unprepared... I, however, considered myself a professional.

But asking a physicist to comment on smoking and cancer is like asking an Air Force captain to comment on the design of a submarine. He might know something about it; then again, he might not. In any case, he's not an expert.

Outside their domains of expertise, scientists may be no more well informed than ordinary people. Indeed, they may be less so as their intense training in one area can lead them to be undereducated in others.

An all-purpose expert is an oxymoron.

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.

No, miltä näyttää?" hän kysyy. "Erinomaiselta, olette yksinkertaisesti taikuri!" "Olen pelkkä mestari," hän vastaa

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

success in any field—be it sports, the arts, business, science, and certainly the military—requires both confidence AND competence.

Confidence is that feeling that you can do something (or that you know something) so well you don't have to think about how to do it when you're doing it. That skill or knowledge is in you, it's part of you, and it will come out when needed if you let it.

It was a real revolution. But with one missing feature. That is the feeling in a people that "We have done it once, and if the new lot let us down, we can do it again!" It was that proud, menacing confidence which made the French revolution special. But it's not around in 21st-century Europe. After 1989, the people handed over liberty to the experts. Will they ever want it back?

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more "Malinowski" the more compelling the book. No "Malinowski," and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.

These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.

We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.

Lansdale became the Agency's expert on guerrilla warfare and countersubversion. He also acquired something more important in government than recognized expertise: a mystique, a reputation for being able to perform miracles.

Then again, no matter what your point of view may be, you can always find someone with a Ph.D to support it.

Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.

He had been in the navy since he was twelve and was Spain's most highly respected sailor.

Automation tends to turn us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit our ability to learn and to develop expertise.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

As the costs of storing and retrieving information have collapsed, sharing expertise ought to be easy. But the cooperative approach based on openness and trust undermines the status of managers, whose wealth depends on the ability to create the impression that they have knowledge that their subordinates cannot be trusted to share.