Unintelligent Quotes

• When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years.

  Mark Twain

  Father, Science, Years

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• The person drawn to dance as profession is notoriously unintellectual. He thinks with his muscles, delights in expression with body, not words; finds analysis painful and boring; and is a creature of physical ebullience.

  Doris Humphrey

  Dance, Stupid, Thinking

  Doris Humphrey (1959). “The art of making dances”

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• What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.93, Modern Library

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• They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.

  H. L. Mencken

  Children, Freedom, Taken

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• When the devil looks at a man who sincerely desires not to sin, he is not so unintelligent as to suggest to him (as he would to a hardened sinner) that he go and commit fornication or go and steal. He knows we do not want that and he does not set out to tell us something we do not want to hear; but he finds out that little bit of self-will or self-righteousness and through that, with the appearance of well doing, he will do us harm.

  Dorotheus of Gaza

  Christian, Men, Self

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• In our universal experience unintelligent material processes do not create life

  Philip Johnson

  Scary, Process, Materials

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• So many people imagine housekeeping to be boring, frustrating, repetitive, unintelligent drudgery. I cannot agree. In fact, having kept house, practiced law, taught, and done many other sorts of work, low and high-paid, I can assure you that it is actually lawyers who are most familiar with the experience of unintelligent drudgery.

  Cheryl Mendelson

  Law, People, House

  Cheryl Mendelson (2005). “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

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• War is a foolish, childish, animalistic, unthinking, unintelligent way of trying to accomplish a purpose.

  Jayne Mansfield

  War, Trying, Purpose

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Usually this desire [for family limitation] has been laid to economic pressure It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It
  has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion.

  Margaret Sanger

  Children, Intelligent, Abortion

  Margaret Sanger (2005). “Woman and the New Race”, p.10, Cosimo, Inc.

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• A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.

  Joe Hill

  Song, Heart, Numbers

  Letter to the editor of Solidarity, November 29, 2014.

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• But they were as different as fire and ice. Robert Kennedy thought Eugene McCarthy was pompous, petty, and venal. McCarthy thought Kennedy was a spoiled, unintelligent demagogue.

  Jack Newfield

  Fire, Ice, Different

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• Money is not a problem, but unintelligent attachment to it is.

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Spiritual, Attachment, Problem

  Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri, Amma, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (2014). “From Amma's Heart”, p.121, M A Center

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• I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Annoyed, Calling

  "Advice to a Young Scientist". Book by Peter Medawar, p. 25, 1979.

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• I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

  Timothy Spall

  Class, People, Want

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• Labour, because it chose to remain unintelligent, either became subservient, or insolently believed in damaging the capitalists' goods and machinery or even in killing the capitalists.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Killing, Machinery, Goods

  Mahatma Gandhi (1983). “Collected Works”

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• An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Abnormal, Mania, Grandeur

  graf Leo Tolstoy, Nathan Haskell Dole (1911). “The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoï”

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• It needs some intelligence to be truly selfish. The unintelligent can only be self-righteous.

  Eric Hoffer

  Selfish, Needs, Self Righteous

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• One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.

  Matthew Arnold

  Class, Ordinary, World

  Matthew Arnold, Stefan Collini (1993). “Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings”, p.91, Cambridge University Press

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• Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.

  Bob Torres

  Army, Order, People

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• IQ tests are routinely used as weapons against Black people in particular and minority groups and poor people generally. The tests are based on white middle-class standards, and when we score low on them, the results are used to justify the prejudice that we are inferior and unintelligent. Since we are taught to believe that the tests are infallible, they have become a self-fulfilling prophecy that cuts off our initiative and brainwashes us.

  Huey Newton

  Believe, Cutting, White

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• That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.

  Douglas Adams

  Cute, Girl, Sarcastic

  Douglas Adams (2009). “Life, the Universe and Everything”, p.128, Pan Macmillan

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• The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were: Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.' My own impression is that she's well rid of you,' I said. My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Good Night, Amy, Able

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• The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Life, Wisdom, Philosophical

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• Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

  Honore de Balzac

  Weed, Marijuana, Degrees

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• He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Men, Texas, Proud

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