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In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
Jeffrey EugenidesNever attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Robert A. HeinleinIt is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.
Robertson DaviesPhilosophical systems? Even the most impressive of them are uncomfortably seated on a throne of rock bottom stupidity, that self-inflicted narrow-mindness which renders a mind capable of believing that it, a part of the immense world, could absolute
Erich HellerThe book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.
Philip PullmanWill Ferrell is probably the funniest comic actor, certainly of my generation. I am a huge, huge Will Ferrell fan. I'm not a huge comedy buff, truthfully. What I find funny is either something unbelievably stupid, like Dumb And Dumber or Airplane!, where the jokes are just so stupid and pointless, or something like The Office or The Comeback, where the humor is in the excruciating awkwardness of a situation. Stella kind of explores both of those, stupidity and awkwardness.
Michael ShowalterThere are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.
Gore VidalWriting is taking a risk, and it is actually fighting invisible and invincible enemies. They are over-confidence, stupidity, expectation and narcissism.
Andrea HirataI think we can rule out 'mixed brain dominance' as a cause of your poor performance at school, Charlie Brown" "Have you ruled out stupidity?" "Peanuts", Charles M
Charles M. SchulzIn fact, we will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things. We have to learn to understand nature and not merely to observe it and endure what it imposes on us. Stupidity, from being an amiable individual defect, has become a social crime.
John Desmond Bernalstupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves
Albert CamusThere are people who want to become rich; they become rich. If you persist you can fulfill any kind of stupidity
RajneeshThis is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
Kurt Vonnegutwhat are you looking for? There is no Truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend?
Blaise CendrarsI am not a perfect being. . . . I have more faults than I know what to do with. I have a naughty temper. I am stubborn, impatient of hindrances and of stupidity. I have not in the truest sense a Christian spirit. I am naturally a fighter. I am lazy. I put off till tomorrow what I might better do today. I do not feel that I have been compensated for the two senses I lack. I have worked hard for all the senses I have got, and always I beg for more.
Helen KellerThe shortest route is not the most direct one, but rather the one where the most favorable winds swell our sails:Mthat is the lesson that seafarers teach. Not to abide by this lesson is to be obstinate: here, firmness of character is tainted with stupidity.
Friedrich NietzscheCourage is perhaps our most admirable trait. The man, or woman, who possesses it is able to plunge ahead, despite dangers, despite warnings, despite hazards of all kinds, to attack the task at hand. Often, it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Jack McDevittAlthough computer-generated artificial intelligence eludes us, artificial stupidity has been perfected.
P. J. O'RourkeI get amazed, I can't look at it but about 10 seconds, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this, I'm trying to find a correct name for it, this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men.
Jimmy SwaggartNever fight with Russian. On your every stratagem they answer unpredictable stupidity.
Otto von BismarckWhat the Republican National Committee did to Ron Paul was the height of rudeness and stupidity for this reason: Why would you alienate an individual who has the ability to attract a new generation of voters, who are already skeptical of your institution but are willing to at least listen through the vehicle of this individual and the words that he is saying? Why would you alienate them, get on the floor and not let them speak? Not have his name go up on the board and see the number of electoral votes that he receives? This is crazy!
Michael SteeleThe line between confidence and arrogance is very fine, Josh,โ Flamel said quietly. โAnd the line between arrogance and stupidity even finer. Sophie,โ he added, without looking at her.
Michael ScottThe stupidity of gossips is that they become frightened when they see your face, and a little word from your mouth makes them vibrate like an electrocuted criminal.
Michael BasseyThere are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve.
J. BudziszewskiThere are only two ways by which to rise in this world, either by one's own industry or by the stupidity of others.
Jean de la BruyereRationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naรฏve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.
Reinhold NiebuhrCaptain Crawford didn't like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose techniques that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I'd gotten the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to a pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck.
Leslie FordHere's what I say: We will ignore the cult of doom and gloom and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate, and summon the brilliance of praise and create. . . Life is crazily in love with us-wildly and innocently in love with us. The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.
Rob BrezsnyWe define boredom as the pain a person feels when he's doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won't, can't, or doesn't dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can't learn, or be intelligent about, what he's not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere.
Paul GoodmanYou could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.
Robert CormierThe lottery is a tax on ignorance, and all the losers that play the game are paying the price for their stupidity.
Neal BoortzOne of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.
Alan BradleyWe like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. Thereโs something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We're using those things โ but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism, and terrorism.
Roy LichtensteinWhatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone de BeauvoirMore computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.
William WulfThe hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
Eric HofferIf we're all led to believe that poverty is just a matter of laziness or stupidity or whatever other justifications we can come up with, then we're not likely to be in a real position to do much about it when it comes to attacking the root cause of the problem. Instead of demanding a more equitable system for the distribution of social and economic goods, we blame the victim. This is insidious, because ideology is something we carry around with us in our heads; it forms the basis of our day-to-day understanding of the world.
Bob TorresI wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or the Moon or my glass [telescope].
Galileo Galilei