Quotes About Stupidity

I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled.

I come from the Town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of Destruction.

There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.

In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

Any real New Yorker is a you-name-it-we-have-it-snob whose heart brims with sympathy for the millions of unfortunates who through misfortune, misguidedness or pure stupidity live anywhere else in the world.

Mingled vanity and pride appear in this, that when miserable men do seek after God, instead of ascending higher than themselves as they ought to do, they measure him by their own carnal stupidity, and neglecting solid inquiry, fly off to indulge their curiosity in vain speculation.

Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion.

I remember being very smart, which is a form of stupidity. I try not to remember it, but it occurs to me that I may have felt intellectual. I entertained views too noble or too bitter to be true. I must have done some soul-stretching of my mental neck.

The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

Life is a flux, nothing abides. Still we are such fools, we go on clinging. If change is the nature of life, then clinging is stupidity, because your clinging is not going to change the law of life. Your clinging is only going to make you miserable. Things are bound to change; whether you cling or not does not matter. If you cling you become miserable: you cling and they change, you feel frustrated. If you don`t cling they still change, but then there is no frustration because you were perfectly aware that they are bound to change. This is how things are, this is the suchness of life.

There are people who want to become rich; they become rich. If you persist you can fulfill any kind of stupidity

To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. To pay yourself less than you are worth is cowardice and pusillanimity.

All the brains in the world are powerless against the sort of stupidity that is in fashion.

Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.

Children are great idealists, until the stupidity of their elders puts out the fires of the aspirations.

What do you mean I have a predetermined death?” – Nick “Did I stutter?” – Death “No.” – Nick “Do I look like Webster’s?” – Death “No.” – Nick “Then you should understand what I said, since I didn’t speak in code. Every mortal creature is born with an expiration date. Some immortals, too. Set by the big clockmaker. But excessive stupidity and moronic tendencies can shorten it. Pissing me off is one really good way to cut yours down to three seconds from now.” – Death

One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough.

Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.

The 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.

I have a sense of humor; but over the years that sense has developed one blind spot. I can no longer laugh at ignorance or stupidity. Those are our chief enemies, and it is dangerous to make fun of them.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Someone said: "I have been prejudiced against myself from my earliest childhood: hence I find some truth in all blame and some stupidity in all praise. I generally estimate praise too poorly and blame too highly.

It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

Captain 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.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

An intelligent man, a man who has a little meditative consciousness, can make his life a beautiful piece of art, can make it so full of love and full of music and full of poetry and full of dance that there are no limitations for it. Life is not hard. It is man's stupidity that makes it hard.

Well . . . he lets it ruin his life. He gets so obsessed with going after the one thing that hurt him that he loses sight of everything else. He becomes isolated from everyone and everything. Paranoid. He feels like he can't trust anyone around him ever. In the end, he loses everything, even his life. And for what? Total stupidity, if you ask me.

I think the fear of being seen as childish or crazy severely limits our enjoyment of the world around us, thus inducing a state of boredom that in turn gives rise to much of the stupidity and meanness that oftem seem to epitomize the human condtion. In fact, these ills merely signify that the dues we pay for adult respectability are far too high, and bring some 'benefits' of questionable value.

Looking at where the planet is now, we could screw things up massively or we could wise-up on a species level and actually make things better. If I had to put my money where my mouth is, I think we'll wise up globally but there will still be outbreaks of local stupidity.

The lottery is a tax on ignorance, and all the losers that play the game are paying the price for their stupidity.

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

Palestinians want a state of their own. They want to live in freedom. They want to get rid of the terrible misery in which they are living. They are ready after fifty years to accept a state of their own in 22 percent of what used to be the country of Palestine. I think it is the height of stupidity on our part if we don't grasp this opportunity.

God has placed clear limits on Man’s intelligence, but none on his stupidity.

I have sought you out to cure me.' 'To cure you of what?' 'Of this cursed affliction.' 'I cannot cure stupidity.' Scapegrace frowned.

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously.

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

The incomparable stupidity of life teaches us to love our parents; divine philosophy teaches us to forgive them.

Contrary to what people may say, there's no upper limit to stupidity.

If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.

Stupidity is a blockage in the ability to receive, integrate and transmit new signals.

Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification.

What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.

Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance; and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity.

Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.