Stupidity Quotes - Page 18

• This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

  Doris Lessing

  Strong, Thinking, Civilization

  Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• I hated the company of other children. I wanted to be a grownup person, to be taken seriously. I hated the idea of childhood; I thought it was a moment of endless stupidity.

  Karl Lagerfeld

  Children, Taken, Ideas

  "In the Now". Interview with John Colapinto, www.newyorker.com. March 19, 2007.

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• There's only one kind of common sense but a thousand varieties of stupidity.

  Evan Esar

  Common Sense, Kind, Thousand

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• Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.

  Milan Kundera

  Views, Evil, Judging

  "Testaments Betrayed". Book by Milan Kundera, 1995.

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• Symons remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms - what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.

  Alain de Botton

  Law, Ideas, Errors

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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• You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.

  Terence McKenna

  Cutting, Years, Enemy

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• Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Death, Determination, Men

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• A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Littles, Guilty, Folly

  Michel de Montaigne, William Hazlitt, Orlando Williams Wight (1866). “Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising his essays, journey into Italy, and letters”, p.311

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• Many brief follies--that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Long, Ends, Folly

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Graham Parkes (2008). “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody”, p.61, Oxford University Press

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• For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Lust, Cowardice, Brutal

  Marcus Tullius Cicero (1853). “The treatises of M.T. Cicero on the nature of the gods [tr. by T.Francklin]; on divination; on fate; on the republic; on the laws; and on standing for the consulship, tr. chiefly by the ed. C.D.Yonge [and F.Barham].”, p.420

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• Nonsense is socially OK, but not stupidity.

  Mason Cooley

  Nonsense, Not Stupid

  "City Aphorisms, Fourteenth Selection". Book by Mason Cooley, 1994.

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• Nonsense prevails, modesty fails Grace and virtue turn into stupidity While the calendar fades almost all barricades to a pale compromise And our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts They still think they're the gods of antiquity If something you missed didn't even exist It was just an ideal is it such a surprise?

  Elvis Costello

  Thinking, Leader, Grace

  Song: All This Useless Beauty, Album: All This Useless Beauty, 1996

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• It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Writing, Issues, Ethical Questions

  "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Unenchanted Evening", p. 39, 1993.

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• A man governs himself by the dictates of virtue and good sense, who acts without zeal or passion in points that are of no consequence; but when the whole community is shaken, and the safety of the public endangered, the appearance of a philosophical or an affected indolence must arise either from stupidity or perfidiousness.

  Joseph Addison

  Philosophical, Passion, Men

  Joseph Addison (1854). “The Works of [the Right Honourable] Joseph Addison: The Spectator, no. 483-600. The Guardian. The lover. The present state of the war. The late trial and cenviction of Count Tariff. The Whig-examiner. The Freeholder, no. 1-30”, p.449

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• Stupidity is a factor to be reckoned with in human affairs. The true leader always expects to encounter it, and prepares to endure it patiently so long as it is normal stupidity. He knows that his ideas will be distorted, his orders carelessly executed; and that there will be jealousy among his assistants. He takes these inevitable phenomena into account, and instead of attempting to find men without faults, who are non-existent, he tries to make use of the best men at his disposal - as they are, and not as they ought to be.

  Andre Maurois

  Men, Order, Ideas

  "The Art of Living". Book by Andre Maurois, 1939.

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• Is it stupidity or is it moral cowardice which leads men to continue professing a creed that makes self-sacrifice a cardinal principle, while they urge the sacrificing of others, even to the death, when they trespass against us? Is it blindness, or is it an insance inconsistency, which makes them regard as most admirable the bearing of evil for the benefit of others, while they lavish admiration on those who, out of revenge, inflict great evils in return for small ones suffered? Surely our barbarian code of right needs revision, and our barbarian standard of honour should be somewhat changed.

  Herbert Spencer

  Revenge, Sacrifice, Men

  Herbert Spencer (1910). “Works: The study of sociology”

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• Men have fashioned an image of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity. For Chance rarely conflicts with intelligence, and most things in life can be set in order by an intelligent sharpsightedness.

  Democritus

  Men, Intelligent, Order

  "Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker", translated by Kathleen Freeman, Harvard University Press, (p. 155), 1948.

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• No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.

  Louis Aragon

  Police, Musician, Arms

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• Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.

  Bruce Sterling

  Stupid, Profound, Computer

  1992 The Hacker Crackdown: law and disorder on the electronic frontier.

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• He (John Major) has the mulishness of a weak man with stupidity.

  Norman Tebbit

  Men, Weak Man, Majors

  "The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt Vol. 3: From Major to Blair". Book by Sarah Curtis, 2000.

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• Stupidity is always a capital crime.

  Larry Niven

  Crime

  "N-Space". Book by Larry Niven, 1989.

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• Ron Paul may be the wackiest candidate in the GOP field. But for pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today.

  Rick Santorum

  Years, May, Today

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• Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.

  Glen Duncan

  Pain, Ideas, Giants

  Glen Duncan (2009). “A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel”, Ecco

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• Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Mean, Games, Two

  Yasunari Kawabata (2015). “The Master of Go”, p.87, Random House

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• It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Silly, Ignorance, Noses

  Gilbert Ryle (2015). “The Concept of Mind”, p.18, Lulu Press, Inc

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