Underestimating People Quotes & Sayings

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context. — Malcolm Gladwell

All my life, people have been underestimating me. — Hugh Carey

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. 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

People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good. They quote that maxim "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public's taste" and I think that's very wrongheaded. I like to believe the audience is actually intelligent, because it's made up of other people like yourself. — Douglas Adams

I've spent my whole life with people underestimating me. — Donna Shalala

Hobos' (a slang term that combines the words 'hope' and 'bowl of beans given to me for free by a woman who then initiated intercourse') — Patton Oswalt

One night when we were lying under the stars together she pointed to this beaming bright star beside the moon and said wherever she was in the world, whether we were together or apart, that I should remember her with that star because it would always be there-that it was her with me. — Rebecah McManus

It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world. — Lester B. Pearson

I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, for me a big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States. — Carol Moseley Braun

The good thing about people underestimating models is that the bar is set so low, you tend to impress people more easily. — Cindy Crawford

[People] are woefully underestimating this country and what it can achieve. — Boris Johnson

I think there's been this long cycle of the big companies making a lot of money by underestimating people's intelligence and people are used to it now. So, they're so used to having their intelligence underestimated that, for most of them, it really isn't worth the bother of paying a little more attention to something that might hit them on a deeper level. But you can't really read people's minds. — J. Robbins

We're here,' the Clock says.
The Perfectionist opens her eyes. She sees nothing. It's white. All white. There's no up. There's no down. No horizon. Nothing. It's just white.
'Clock, what is this?' asks the Perfectionist. Her voice is shaky.
'This is the future.'
'This is the future?' the Perfectionist asks. Her mouth is dry. She forces herself to swallow.
'Why is the future like this?'
'Because it hasn't happened yet,' says the Clock — Andrew Kaufman

The roots of the word "compete" are the Latin con petire, which meant "to seek together. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This is something we're very committed to, it's something that I think people are underestimating right now as they've seen some of the dot-com promises not come through. I think they're missing the fact that the basic technology is moving forward, the new platforms are here and this vision of the digital decade will be a reality. — Bill Gates

It's funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you - and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages. — Barry Eisler

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people. — Mark Zuckerberg

A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if,
without complexes and without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from
oppressor and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is
nourished by the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful influences
and any kind of subjection to foreign culture. Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist
domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily
an act of culture — Amilcar Cabral

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched 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. — H.L. Mencken

Happens to me all the time ... People are always underestimating my dumbness. — Janet Evanovich

The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists. — William James

You'll have more than enough people underestimating you in your lifetime, Kyali Corwynall. You cannot afford to be one of them. — Amy Bai