stupidity

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
e105f10	Honestly, if you were any slower, you'd be going backward.	stupidity	J.K. Rowling
650924c	Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.	understanding stupidity reason sense rationality	Euripides
b16d303	If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!	humour stupidity religion	Terry Pratchett
ecb0d47	Stupidity isn't punishable by death. If it was, there would be a hell of a population drop.	stupidity	Laurell K. Hamilton
1073735	Evil isn't the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it's a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.	stupidity harry-dresden	Jim Butcher
593ebf1	Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.	stupidity	Margaret Atwood
8a6721e	You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.	stupidity malice	Robert A. Heinlein
0a1695b	Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.	words silence stupidity talking	William Faulkner
d172f25	Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.	stupidity intelligence sense	Jane Austen
dbfb9f8	Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.	racism stupidity religion dislikes scepticism superstition	Christopher Hitchens
cb33457	The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.	stupidity	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
055146c	"When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." [ ]" --	stupidity genius	Jonathan Swift
7c1ab25	To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.	stupidity	Julian Barnes
8bc8c75	If it is stupid but it works, it isn't stupid. (a Shin'a'in saying)	trying stupidity	Mercedes Lackey
70ea7cd	All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.	stupidity	Mark Haddon
458ebea	If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.	stupidity put-downs	Kurt Vonnegut
7d96d8d	Longbottom, if brains were gold, you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something.	harry-potter stupidity draco-malfoy neville-longbottom ron-weasley	J.K. Rowling
756bb9c	"That was horrible. Horrible. That poor little guy." Pex was unrepentant. "Yeah, well, he asked for it. Calling us ... all those things." But---buried alive! That's like in that horror movie. Y'know -- the one with all the horror." I think I saw that one. With all the words going up on the screen at the end?" Yeah, that was it. Tell you the truth, those words kinda ruined it for me."	stupidity humor horror-movies killers	Eoin Colfer
9c876fd	One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so--but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.	stupidity intelligence trillian zaphod-beeblebrox hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy	Douglas Adams
a89ea1c	"I'm a werewolf trapped in a human body." "Well, yeah, that's kind of the definition." "No, really. I'm trapped." "Oh? When was the last time you shape-shifted?" "That's just it - I've never shape-shifted." "So you're not really a werewolf." "Not yet. But I was meant to be one, I just know it. How do I get a werewolf to attack me?" Stand in the middle of a forest under a full moon with a raw steak tied to your face, holding a sign that says, 'Eat me; I'm stupid'?" --	stupidity werewolves	Carrie Vaughn
e8e6f5c	You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid--and I know they are--yet I won't be wiser?	stupidity	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
adb836a	He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.	stupidity	Tamora Pierce
ef7d4f9	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.	stupidity luck	Jeffrey Eugenides
4089308	Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.	stupidity science	Carl Sagan
5c5e3ee	And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.	stupidity tolstoy dishonesty trickery intellect pride	Leo Tolstoy
eaf3bb2	Intelligent people know they are intelligent. They also know that one person cannot know all, hence a person is not stupid simply because he is ignorant of one thing or another. They know that, to another intelligent person, they will not appear stupid in asking for an explanation of what they do not know, and so their ignorance on any particular issue does not become an embarrassment.	stupidity stupid	Lynsay Sands
7810d9c	The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.	stupidity work	Adam Smith
1d03123	And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?	stupidity	Orson Scott Card
b7409f2	When the telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's , I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship--though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved...	enlightenment irony literature hate stupidity religion friendship humor love bastille demagogy fatwa first-amendment satanic-verses washington-post united-states-constitution george-hw-bush iran khomeini theocracy intimidation dictatorship united-states rushdie individualism fascism principles bullying free-speech censorship	Christopher Hitchens
39465e4	I love stupid plans.	stupidity	Megan Whalen Turner
91e4b3f	It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.	stupidity wisdom-quote valor	Arthur Conan Doyle
dcf5db0	People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.	stupidity	Richard Ford
e6bf97f	You might well ask just what the hell he was thinking. The answer is, probably nothing at all.He'd probably say he was exercising his God-given right to stupidity.	stupidity the-book-thief	Markus Zusak
32a1560	[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.	stupidity intelligence	George Bernard Shaw
921d364	Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.	humour stupidity intelligence	Terry Pratchett
2e126cd	People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.	stupidity truth	Max Barry
3050a7a	How stupid lovers can be! But if they were not, there would be no story.	stupidity	Jean Plaidy
f9951fc	Silk is a fine, delicate, soft, illuminating, beautiful substance. But you can never rip it! If a man takes this tender silk and attempts to tear it, and cannot tear it, is he in his right mind to say "This silk is fake! I thought it was soft, I thought it was delicate, but look, I cannot even tear it" ? Surely, this man is not in his right mind! The silk is not fake! This silk is 100% real. It's the man who is stupid!	delicate strength-of-a-woman stupidity inspirational-life inspirational-quotes strength wisdom inspirational parable stupidity-of-man gentle parables genuine silk soft real wisdom-quotes fake	C. JoyBell C.
405e48a	"I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy."	stupidity	Orson Scott Card
08b9e25	We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction	poverty stupidity	Orhan Pamuk
dcafc8a	The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn't know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.	stupidity crazy-people phoenix stupid-people stupid crazy	Chuck Palahniuk
7654975	And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.	stupidity intelligence truth	Mark Haddon
f0c7024	Never confuse honor with stupidity!	stupidity humor	R.A. Salvatore
07628cd	Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?	mankind futility stupidity humanity learning intelligence wisdom foolishness knowledge	H. Rider Haggard
15f624a	Actually, I was prone to random acts of stupidity. I considered it to be one of my talents.	stupidity humor talents	Jennifer L. Armentrout
606e5be	When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin.	stupidity	Meljean Brook
648f885	For someone who's smarter than a supercomputer, sometimes you're a real idiot.	stupidity natalie-kabra the39clues	Gordon Korman
44938b4	Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?' 'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.	stupidity stupid-people rumours slander conversation talking	Anne Brontë
78bc10a	Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision...	stupidity galaxies jernau-morat-gurgeh time-travel mistakes shame regret	Iain M. Banks
c147647	"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?' 'Of course. Who said it?' 'I don't know.' 'He was probably a coward,' she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them." --	bravery perseverance stupidity intelligence coward cowardice	Ernest Hemingway
7cbba05	An eleven-year-old girl is many things, but she is not stupid.	stupidity	Markus Zusak
21b1c67	As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I'm not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What's done is done; I have to look ahead.	people stupidity love moving-forward	Isabel Allende
3f358e2	It's not evil, Rand. I know something evil when I smell it. This isn't evil, it's just incredibly stupid.	stupidity	Robert Jordan
8fd61b2	The internet is where some people go to show their true intelligence; others, their hidden stupidity.	freedom stupidity intelligence consequence closet cyberspace cyberspace-internet libel prejudices information social-networking online beliefs slander extrovert introvert propaganda media gossip internet technology	Criss Jami
f07ca60	"Right!" "Right!" "You can get there!" "I can get there!" "You're a natural at counting to two!" "I'm a nat'ral at counting to two!" "If you can count to two, you can count to anything!" "If I can count to two, I can count to anything!" "And then the world is your mollusc!" "My mollusc! What's a mollusc?"	stupidity vocabulary	Terry Pratchett
55e0e33	When we see that almost everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing no effort and encountering a thousand toils and dangers in the process, has, in the end, no further object than to raise themselves in the estimation of others; when we see that not only offices, titles, decorations, but also wealth, nay, even knowledge[1] and art, are striven for only to obtain, as the ultimate goal of all effort, greater respect from one's fellowmen,--is not this a lamentable proof of the extent to which human folly can go?	stupidity	Arthur Schopenhauer
fbdbddf	Use that fluff of yours you call a brain.	stupidity funny humor	Agatha Christie
1ece267	Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.	stupidity	Carl Hiaasen
af13c9b	What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.	stupidity	Iris Murdoch
66fec68	It's the fools that make all the trouble in the world, not the wicked.	good stupidity	L.M. Montgomery
e547c56	People do not read stupidities with impunity.	stupidity	Victor Hugo
fa51228	"You smoke?" "Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot?"	suicide stupidity cigarette lung-cancer slow-death tobacco cigarettes health idiocy poison smoking idiot	Richard K. Morgan
0e9d5bf	Nero, you are an example to all the children on this shuttle. Because most of them are so foolish, they think it is better to keep their stupidest thoughts to themselves. You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you, like Nero Boulanger, and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it's actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeak out some whimpering fart of a thought, so that you have a chance to learn.	stupidity humiliation	Orson Scott Card
5bd3441	Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts. Pequenino: While collectively... Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.> Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with. Hive Queen: Exactly.	discovery stupidity humanity pequeninos intelligence	Orson Scott Card
15e6177	"Am I too late?" Caleb asked as he joined them. "Did he do something stupid?" "Yeah. On both counts." Tristan stalked past Nick."	stupidity nick-gautier tristan	Sherrilyn Kenyon
15fee80	I hate stupidity, but what I hate even more is when people actually brag about it.	stupidity ignorance pride	Bill Maher
3b54aa5	As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the , , , , Tyndalls, , , , and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.	prejudice mind world stupidity reason fear adulterers alexander-humboldt children-science david-hume draper ernst-haeckel haeckel herbert-spencer humboldt hume john-draper john-william-draper persecutors propositions spencer theologian vilify wilhelm-humboldt wilhelm-von-humboldt alexander-von-humboldt murderers astronomy charles-darwin theologians geology afterlife theology darwin paine thomas-paine voltaire sublime knowledge power poison john-tyndall tyndall	Robert G. Ingersoll
ca9b7d5	"you're Shane, right?' He inched away from her and managed a quick nod as he twisted the rag he held in his fingers. 'Heidi sad you were willing to teach me how to ride.' Her expression shifted from entertained to confused, as if she was wondering why no one had mentioned he was a can or two shy of a six-pack. 'A horse,' he clarified, then wanted to kick himself. What else but a horse? Did he think she was here to learn to ride his mother's elephant? One corner of Annabelle's perfect, full mouth twitched. 'A horse would be good. You seem to have several.' He wanted to remind himself that he was usually fine around women. Smooth even. He was intelligent, funny and could, on occasion, be charming. Just not now, with his blood pumping and his brain doing nothing more than shouting "it's her, it's her" over and over again. Chemistry, he thought grimly. It could turn the smartest man into a drooling idiot. Here he was, proving the theory true."	stupidity awkward-encounters shane chemistry	Susan Mallery
d3eaac2	Is that gallantry I smell, or just stupidity? The two scents are much alike, as I recall.	stupidity gallantry scents	George R.R. Martin
4a524a8	I personally think humans have got about as far as we can go. We're wrecking the planet. We're never short of good reasons to massacre each other. Wrong god. Wrong race. Wrong color. Wrong sex. I'm actually quite surprised a thoroughly pissed-off History hasn't waved a flaming sword and we're all back in caves in the snow, chewing on half-cooked mammoth. And even that's more than we deserve. No wonder we still can't get to Mars. I suspect the Universe is making damned sure we don't get the chance to contaminate other planets with our stupidity. It's keeping us on this one where the only thing we can damage is each other.	universe stupidity	Jodi Taylor
dcd8df6	"(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:) "Lion, rifles -- and stupidity."	stupidity lions	Beryl Markham
ee6859a	One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless.	stupidity	Henry Miller
6ef2e83	Oliver has stated many times his dislike of hearing advice from his younger sister, so it is his own fault if he has not got sense enough to see which way the wind is blowing.	stupidity funny ignored common-sense brothers siblings	Patricia C. Wrede
1342eec	Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agelastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!	progress stupidity education spectrum flaubert essay knowledge modernity	Milan Kundera
6904e8e	The belief that the world was created yesterday seems to hold great appeal to those born at that time.	stupidity religion science religious-fundamentalism creationism	Gary Malone
3aa4fad	The good stupid is the brave kind. When there's a real reason behind. Bad stupid is everything else.	stupidity truth	Brandon Mull
6f8955c	If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.	stupidity rational-thought language logic irrationality	Robert M. Pirsig
b2db060	The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.	literature stupidity philosophy czech-literature foolishness questions novel	Milan Kundera
85257f9	Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.	stupidity	Edward St. Aubyn
1d54413	Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?	people freedom stupidity free-spirits fucking	Don DeLillo
2f71529	worms have crawled up your nose and eaten your wits.	stupidity morbid-humor sarcasm	George R.R. Martin
a9fc282	None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion. He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment. The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.	stupidity hunting lions tourists	Beryl Markham
555a0a8	[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.	self-knowledge stupidity	Jonathan Franzen
c1b00c9	Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.	stupidity education coarseness crudeness ignorance	Iain Pears
f098d0c	What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together	progress stupidity science	Julian Barnes
5d7e4dd	I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture.	stupidity ignorance	H.G. Wells
0a3f545	You know what? We need a recession in this country, because that would finaly weed out al the subnormal, underdeveloped, stupefied, puerile people in this workforce.	stupidity funny employement jobless joblessness unemployed recession need stupid	Jen Lancaster
3184778	But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment --in short, for the true talent for catastrophe -- Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day. Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganized enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.	stupidity military failure	George MacDonald Fraser
5d8436d	The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.	mankind stupidity humanity truth great-men mountain instinct	Doris Lessing
ff8d3fa	Silly,' he said with mock serenity, 'isn't a word you should ever apply to people. They may be totally stupid, in fact, but if you call them silly you've lost their vote.	stupidity silliness	Dick Francis
0522754	Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.	stupidity structural-violence	David Graeber
b7e3fc8	"IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING - FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THAT'S HIM, THAT'S THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HE'S A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED "DICK." HE'S PRETTY SCARY. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM IS NOT UNLIKE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TV EVANGELIST - OUR FUTURE PRESIDENT. WHAT'S WRONG WITH BOTH OF THEM IS THAT THEY'RE SO SURE THEY'RE RIGHT! THAT'S PRETTY SCARY - THE FUTURE, I THINK, IS PRETTY SCARY."	stupidity politics humor future-prediction politicians president	John Irving
9549ae9	And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.	stupidity regret	Paul Auster
2c37de5	I'm not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should've heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would've puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn't funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony--I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don't even think he knows any more when he's playing right or not. It isn't all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off--they'd foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.	stupidity	J.D. Salinger
f89ddc9	"I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness,	good stupidity religion intelligence philosophy wisdom holiness fool	William Blake
2657b1a	This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson--or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter--has come up with.	stupidity in-denial superficial racist	Bret Easton Ellis
f4804e9	L'essere umano e davvero una creatura straordinaria. Ha scoperto il fuoco, edificato citta, scritto magnifiche poesie, dato interpretazioni del mondo, inventato mitologie etc... Ma allo stesso tempo non ha smesso di fare la guerra ai suoi simili, non ha smesso di ingannarsi, di distruggere l'ambiente circostante. La somma algebrica fra vigore intellettuale e coglioneria da un risultato quasi nullo. Dunque, decidendo di parlare di imbecillita, rendiamo in un certo senso omaggio a questa creatura che e per meta geniale, per meta imbecille	human-being stupidity genialità stupidita genius	Umberto Eco
5cc61d7	It is not easy to be the citizen of a Superpower, nor is it getting easier. I would feel isolated with my shame if I were not sure that I belong, among millions of Americans, to a perennial minority of the nation. The obstinate bleeding hearts who will never agree that might makes right and know if the end justifies the means, the end is worthless. Power corrupts, an old truism but why does it also make the powerful so stupid? Their power schemes become unstuck in time, at cruel cost to other; then the powerful put their stupid important heads together and invent the next similar schemes [written 1987].	war stupidity power-corrupts vietnam	Martha Gellhorn
27799fd	Oh, don't be so wise and stupid.	stupidity wisdom oxymoron	Elizabeth Gaskell
0c839f6	syaamuyyel kryaamaar, yini prthm dike myaanuyyelaa de mNtebherde benaame kyyekttaa romaanttik bokaami si krechilen -- romaanttisijmer sonaali dinguloyy -- tini phyaakaashe ek jaarmaan baabaa ebN myylaa ek cile maayyer prsprbirodhii phsl / ei dbait shurur sngge yog krun phraasi shikssaa aar saahityik prekssaaptt, aar aapni abaak hben -- kiNbaa, hyyto, pritusstt o maansikbhaabe tRpt -- taaNr critrer adbhut jttiltaar kthaa shune / syaamuyyeler aache bishuddh, bhruukoNckaano, kaalokphir phoNttaar mtn ckcke dui cokh, uddht o abjnyaachaap naak, behaayyaa kaamuk tthoNtt, cauko sbairaacaarii thutni, aar raaphaayyelke nkl-kraa maathaabhrti cul / --- lokttaa ekisngge bhiissnn als, krunnaa-jaagaano uccaakaangkhii, ebN khyaati-paaoyyaa abhaagaa ; kennaa saaraajiibne uni aadhkhyaaNcrraa dhyaandhaarnnaa chaarraa aar kichui brro ekttaa bhaabte paarenni / kuNrremir ye suury onaar caaripaashe copordin rod chrraayy taa onaake kssiyye diyyechil, aar kheyye phelechil onaake deyyaa sbrger ysaamaany prtibhaar khoraak / pyaariser ei bhyyngkr jiibne aami ye smst aaddek-bishaal maanussder dekhechi, syaamuyyel seisb jmghttiyyaa caalu cijer ceyye beshi-kichu chilen -- duniyyaar baaire ekjn , kheyyaali jiib, yaaNr kbitaa onaar rcnaar ceyye cehaaraayy beshi kholtaai hto, emni ekjn yini, dupur ekttaa naagaad, taap poyyaabaar kyylaar aaguner jhlk aar ghrrir ttikttker maajhe, sb smyy mne hto yen npuNsktaar ekjn debtaa -- ekjn aadhunik, ubhlainggik debtaa --- npuNsktaayy emn bishaal, emn nidaarunn ye taaNke mne hto mhaakaabyik !	lover loss stupidity life-quotes love	Charles Baudelaire
38295de	"Falderson," he said quietly to Bahzell in passable Navahkan, "is as stupid as the day is long." He craned his neck to gaze up at the hradani and shook his head. "In fact, he's even stupider than I thought. You, sir, are the biggest damned hradani-no offense-I think I've ever seen."	stupidity humor hradani humours large day tall long dumb stupid	David Weber
ceb1302	the general trouble with ignorance is always that ignorant people have no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius. If you're stupid you can always blame miscalculation on bad luck.	stupidity	Louis de Bernières
dd6eb42	"One German-American friend of mine, an architectural historian my own age, can be counted on to excoriate Woodrow Wilson after he has had several strong drinks. He goes on to say that it was Wilson who persuaded this country that it was patriotic to be stupid, to be proud of knowing only one language, of believing that all other cultures were inferior and ridiculous, offensive to God and common sense alike, that artists and teachers and studious persons in general were ninnies when it came to dealing with problems in life that really mattered, and on and on. This friend says that it was a particular misfortune for this country that the German-Americans had achieved such eminence in the arts and education when it was their turn to be scorned from on high. To hate all they did and stood for at that time, which included gymnastics, by the way, was to lobotomize not only the German-Americans but our culture. "That left American football," says my German-American friend, and someone is elected to drive him home."	stupidity woodrow-wilson nationality patriotism ignorance knowledge	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
7840d5f	I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge. Look at the way things are. I'm no fucken genius or anything, but these spazzos are in charge of my every twitch. What I'm starting to think is maybe only the dumb are safe in this world, the ones who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing. But see me? I have to think about every little fucken thing.	stupidity vernon little	D.B.C. Pierre
82c882f	[Lynda's mother] You're stupid and you don't know it, you're problem. You talk, talk, talk, all the time. No one wants to listen to an idiot. [Young Lynda] Uh. OK. Thanks, Mom.	stupidity mothers-and-daughters	Lynda Barry
42e16bc	Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man's confidence in his own wisdom.	stupidity wisdom	Barbara Kingsolver

Honestly, if you were any slower, you'd be going backward.

J.K. Rowling

650924c

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

understanding stupidity reason sense rationality

Euripides

b16d303

If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!

humour stupidity religion

Terry Pratchett

ecb0d47

Stupidity isn't punishable by death. If it was, there would be a hell of a population drop.

stupidity

Laurell K. Hamilton

1073735

Evil isn't the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it's a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.

stupidity harry-dresden

Jim Butcher

593ebf1

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

stupidity

Margaret Atwood

8a6721e

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

stupidity malice

Robert A. Heinlein

0a1695b

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

words silence stupidity talking

William Faulkner

d172f25

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.

stupidity intelligence sense

Jane Austen

dbfb9f8

Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

racism stupidity religion dislikes scepticism superstition

Christopher Hitchens

cb33457

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.

stupidity

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

055146c

"When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." [ ]" --

stupidity genius

Jonathan Swift

7c1ab25

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

stupidity

Julian Barnes

8bc8c75

If it is stupid but it works, it isn't stupid. (a Shin'a'in saying)

trying stupidity

Mercedes Lackey

70ea7cd

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

stupidity

Mark Haddon

458ebea

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.

stupidity put-downs

Kurt Vonnegut

7d96d8d

Longbottom, if brains were gold, you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something.

harry-potter stupidity draco-malfoy neville-longbottom ron-weasley

J.K. Rowling

756bb9c

"That was horrible. Horrible. That poor little guy." Pex was unrepentant. "Yeah, well, he asked for it. Calling us ... all those things." But---buried alive! That's like in that horror movie. Y'know -- the one with all the horror." I think I saw that one. With all the words going up on the screen at the end?" Yeah, that was it. Tell you the truth, those words kinda ruined it for me."

stupidity humor horror-movies killers

Eoin Colfer

9c876fd

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so--but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.

stupidity intelligence trillian zaphod-beeblebrox hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy

Douglas Adams

a89ea1c

"I'm a werewolf trapped in a human body." "Well, yeah, that's kind of the definition." "No, really. I'm trapped." "Oh? When was the last time you shape-shifted?" "That's just it - I've never shape-shifted." "So you're not really a werewolf." "Not yet. But I was meant to be one, I just know it. How do I get a werewolf to attack me?" Stand in the middle of a forest under a full moon with a raw steak tied to your face, holding a sign that says, 'Eat me; I'm stupid'?" --

stupidity werewolves

Carrie Vaughn

e8e6f5c

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid--and I know they are--yet I won't be wiser?

stupidity

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

adb836a

He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.

stupidity

Tamora Pierce

ef7d4f9

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.

stupidity luck

Jeffrey Eugenides

4089308

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

stupidity science

Carl Sagan

5c5e3ee

And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.

stupidity tolstoy dishonesty trickery intellect pride

Leo Tolstoy

eaf3bb2

Intelligent people know they are intelligent. They also know that one person cannot know all, hence a person is not stupid simply because he is ignorant of one thing or another. They know that, to another intelligent person, they will not appear stupid in asking for an explanation of what they do not know, and so their ignorance on any particular issue does not become an embarrassment.

stupidity stupid

Lynsay Sands

7810d9c

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

stupidity work

Adam Smith

1d03123

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

stupidity

Orson Scott Card

b7409f2

When the telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's , I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship--though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved...

enlightenment irony literature hate stupidity religion friendship humor love bastille demagogy fatwa first-amendment satanic-verses washington-post united-states-constitution george-hw-bush iran khomeini theocracy intimidation dictatorship united-states rushdie individualism fascism principles bullying free-speech censorship

Christopher Hitchens

39465e4

I love stupid plans.

stupidity

Megan Whalen Turner

91e4b3f

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

stupidity wisdom-quote valor

Arthur Conan Doyle

dcf5db0

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

stupidity

Richard Ford

e6bf97f

You might well ask just what the hell he was thinking. The answer is, probably nothing at all.He'd probably say he was exercising his God-given right to stupidity.

stupidity the-book-thief

Markus Zusak

32a1560

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

stupidity intelligence

George Bernard Shaw

921d364

Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

humour stupidity intelligence

Terry Pratchett

2e126cd

People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.

stupidity truth

Max Barry

3050a7a

How stupid lovers can be! But if they were not, there would be no story.

stupidity

Jean Plaidy

f9951fc

Silk is a fine, delicate, soft, illuminating, beautiful substance. But you can never rip it! If a man takes this tender silk and attempts to tear it, and cannot tear it, is he in his right mind to say "This silk is fake! I thought it was soft, I thought it was delicate, but look, I cannot even tear it" ? Surely, this man is not in his right mind! The silk is not fake! This silk is 100% real. It's the man who is stupid!

delicate strength-of-a-woman stupidity inspirational-life inspirational-quotes strength wisdom inspirational parable stupidity-of-man gentle parables genuine silk soft real wisdom-quotes fake

C. JoyBell C.

405e48a

"I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy."

stupidity

Orson Scott Card

08b9e25

We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction

poverty stupidity

Orhan Pamuk

dcafc8a

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn't know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

stupidity crazy-people phoenix stupid-people stupid crazy

Chuck Palahniuk

7654975

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

stupidity intelligence truth

Mark Haddon

f0c7024

Never confuse honor with stupidity!

stupidity humor

R.A. Salvatore

07628cd

Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?

mankind futility stupidity humanity learning intelligence wisdom foolishness knowledge

H. Rider Haggard

15f624a

Actually, I was prone to random acts of stupidity. I considered it to be one of my talents.

stupidity humor talents

Jennifer L. Armentrout

606e5be

When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin.

stupidity

Meljean Brook

648f885

For someone who's smarter than a supercomputer, sometimes you're a real idiot.

stupidity natalie-kabra the39clues

Gordon Korman

44938b4

Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?' 'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.

stupidity stupid-people rumours slander conversation talking

Anne Brontë

78bc10a

Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision...

stupidity galaxies jernau-morat-gurgeh time-travel mistakes shame regret

Iain M. Banks

c147647

"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?' 'Of course. Who said it?' 'I don't know.' 'He was probably a coward,' she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them." --

bravery perseverance stupidity intelligence coward cowardice

Ernest Hemingway

7cbba05

An eleven-year-old girl is many things, but she is not stupid.

stupidity

Markus Zusak

21b1c67

As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I'm not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What's done is done; I have to look ahead.

people stupidity love moving-forward

Isabel Allende

3f358e2

It's not evil, Rand. I know something evil when I smell it. This isn't evil, it's just incredibly stupid.

stupidity

Robert Jordan

8fd61b2

The internet is where some people go to show their true intelligence; others, their hidden stupidity.

freedom stupidity intelligence consequence closet cyberspace cyberspace-internet libel prejudices information social-networking online beliefs slander extrovert introvert propaganda media gossip internet technology

Criss Jami

f07ca60

"Right!" "Right!" "You can get there!" "I can get there!" "You're a natural at counting to two!" "I'm a nat'ral at counting to two!" "If you can count to two, you can count to anything!" "If I can count to two, I can count to anything!" "And then the world is your mollusc!" "My mollusc! What's a mollusc?"

stupidity vocabulary

Terry Pratchett

55e0e33

When we see that almost everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing no effort and encountering a thousand toils and dangers in the process, has, in the end, no further object than to raise themselves in the estimation of others; when we see that not only offices, titles, decorations, but also wealth, nay, even knowledge[1] and art, are striven for only to obtain, as the ultimate goal of all effort, greater respect from one's fellowmen,--is not this a lamentable proof of the extent to which human folly can go?

stupidity

Arthur Schopenhauer

fbdbddf

Use that fluff of yours you call a brain.

stupidity funny humor

Agatha Christie

1ece267

Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.

stupidity

Carl Hiaasen

af13c9b

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.

stupidity

Iris Murdoch

66fec68

It's the fools that make all the trouble in the world, not the wicked.

good stupidity

L.M. Montgomery

e547c56

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

stupidity

Victor Hugo

fa51228

"You smoke?" "Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot?"

suicide stupidity cigarette lung-cancer slow-death tobacco cigarettes health idiocy poison smoking idiot

Richard K. Morgan

0e9d5bf

Nero, you are an example to all the children on this shuttle. Because most of them are so foolish, they think it is better to keep their stupidest thoughts to themselves. You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you, like Nero Boulanger, and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it's actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeak out some whimpering fart of a thought, so that you have a chance to learn.

stupidity humiliation

Orson Scott Card

5bd3441

Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts. Pequenino: While collectively... Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.> Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with. Hive Queen: Exactly.

discovery stupidity humanity pequeninos intelligence

Orson Scott Card

15e6177

"Am I too late?" Caleb asked as he joined them. "Did he do something stupid?" "Yeah. On both counts." Tristan stalked past Nick."

stupidity nick-gautier tristan

Sherrilyn Kenyon

15fee80

I hate stupidity, but what I hate even more is when people actually brag about it.

stupidity ignorance pride

Bill Maher

3b54aa5

As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the , , , , Tyndalls, , , , and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.

prejudice mind world stupidity reason fear adulterers alexander-humboldt children-science david-hume draper ernst-haeckel haeckel herbert-spencer humboldt hume john-draper john-william-draper persecutors propositions spencer theologian vilify wilhelm-humboldt wilhelm-von-humboldt alexander-von-humboldt murderers astronomy charles-darwin theologians geology afterlife theology darwin paine thomas-paine voltaire sublime knowledge power poison john-tyndall tyndall

Robert G. Ingersoll

ca9b7d5

"you're Shane, right?' He inched away from her and managed a quick nod as he twisted the rag he held in his fingers. 'Heidi sad you were willing to teach me how to ride.' Her expression shifted from entertained to confused, as if she was wondering why no one had mentioned he was a can or two shy of a six-pack. 'A horse,' he clarified, then wanted to kick himself. What else but a horse? Did he think she was here to learn to ride his mother's elephant? One corner of Annabelle's perfect, full mouth twitched. 'A horse would be good. You seem to have several.' He wanted to remind himself that he was usually fine around women. Smooth even. He was intelligent, funny and could, on occasion, be charming. Just not now, with his blood pumping and his brain doing nothing more than shouting "it's her, it's her" over and over again. Chemistry, he thought grimly. It could turn the smartest man into a drooling idiot. Here he was, proving the theory true."

stupidity awkward-encounters shane chemistry

Susan Mallery

d3eaac2

Is that gallantry I smell, or just stupidity? The two scents are much alike, as I recall.

stupidity gallantry scents

George R.R. Martin

4a524a8

I personally think humans have got about as far as we can go. We're wrecking the planet. We're never short of good reasons to massacre each other. Wrong god. Wrong race. Wrong color. Wrong sex. I'm actually quite surprised a thoroughly pissed-off History hasn't waved a flaming sword and we're all back in caves in the snow, chewing on half-cooked mammoth. And even that's more than we deserve. No wonder we still can't get to Mars. I suspect the Universe is making damned sure we don't get the chance to contaminate other planets with our stupidity. It's keeping us on this one where the only thing we can damage is each other.

universe stupidity

Jodi Taylor

dcd8df6

"(Quoting her friend Tom Black on an amateur hunter's injury:) "Lion, rifles -- and stupidity."

stupidity lions

Beryl Markham

ee6859a

One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless.

stupidity

Henry Miller

6ef2e83

Oliver has stated many times his dislike of hearing advice from his younger sister, so it is his own fault if he has not got sense enough to see which way the wind is blowing.

stupidity funny ignored common-sense brothers siblings

Patricia C. Wrede

1342eec

Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agelastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!

progress stupidity education spectrum flaubert essay knowledge modernity

Milan Kundera

6904e8e

The belief that the world was created yesterday seems to hold great appeal to those born at that time.

stupidity religion science religious-fundamentalism creationism

Gary Malone

3aa4fad

The good stupid is the brave kind. When there's a real reason behind. Bad stupid is everything else.

stupidity truth

Brandon Mull

6f8955c

If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

stupidity rational-thought language logic irrationality

Robert M. Pirsig

b2db060

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

literature stupidity philosophy czech-literature foolishness questions novel

Milan Kundera

85257f9

Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.

stupidity

Edward St. Aubyn

1d54413

Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?

people freedom stupidity free-spirits fucking

Don DeLillo

2f71529

worms have crawled up your nose and eaten your wits.

stupidity morbid-humor sarcasm

George R.R. Martin

a9fc282

None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion. He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment. The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.

stupidity hunting lions tourists

Beryl Markham

555a0a8

[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.

self-knowledge stupidity

Jonathan Franzen

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Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.

stupidity education coarseness crudeness ignorance

Iain Pears

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What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together

progress stupidity science

Julian Barnes

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I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture.

stupidity ignorance

H.G. Wells

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You know what? We need a recession in this country, because that would finaly weed out al the subnormal, underdeveloped, stupefied, puerile people in this workforce.

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Jen Lancaster

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But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment --in short, for the true talent for catastrophe -- Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day. Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganized enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.

stupidity military failure

George MacDonald Fraser

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The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

mankind stupidity humanity truth great-men mountain instinct

Doris Lessing

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Silly,' he said with mock serenity, 'isn't a word you should ever apply to people. They may be totally stupid, in fact, but if you call them silly you've lost their vote.

stupidity silliness

Dick Francis

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Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

stupidity structural-violence

David Graeber

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"IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING - FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THAT'S HIM, THAT'S THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HE'S A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED "DICK." HE'S PRETTY SCARY. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM IS NOT UNLIKE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TV EVANGELIST - OUR FUTURE PRESIDENT. WHAT'S WRONG WITH BOTH OF THEM IS THAT THEY'RE SO SURE THEY'RE RIGHT! THAT'S PRETTY SCARY - THE FUTURE, I THINK, IS PRETTY SCARY."

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John Irving

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And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

stupidity regret

Paul Auster

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I'm not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should've heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would've puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn't funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony--I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don't even think he knows any more when he's playing right or not. It isn't all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off--they'd foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.

stupidity

J.D. Salinger

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"I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness,

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William Blake

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This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson--or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter--has come up with.

stupidity in-denial superficial racist

Bret Easton Ellis

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L'essere umano e davvero una creatura straordinaria. Ha scoperto il fuoco, edificato citta, scritto magnifiche poesie, dato interpretazioni del mondo, inventato mitologie etc... Ma allo stesso tempo non ha smesso di fare la guerra ai suoi simili, non ha smesso di ingannarsi, di distruggere l'ambiente circostante. La somma algebrica fra vigore intellettuale e coglioneria da un risultato quasi nullo. Dunque, decidendo di parlare di imbecillita, rendiamo in un certo senso omaggio a questa creatura che e per meta geniale, per meta imbecille

human-being stupidity genialità stupidita genius

Umberto Eco

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It is not easy to be the citizen of a Superpower, nor is it getting easier. I would feel isolated with my shame if I were not sure that I belong, among millions of Americans, to a perennial minority of the nation. The obstinate bleeding hearts who will never agree that might makes right and know if the end justifies the means, the end is worthless. Power corrupts, an old truism but why does it also make the powerful so stupid? Their power schemes become unstuck in time, at cruel cost to other; then the powerful put their stupid important heads together and invent the next similar schemes [written 1987].

war stupidity power-corrupts vietnam

Martha Gellhorn

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Oh, don't be so wise and stupid.

stupidity wisdom oxymoron

Elizabeth Gaskell

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syaamuyyel kryaamaar, yini prthm dike myaanuyyelaa de mNtebherde benaame kyyekttaa romaanttik bokaami si krechilen -- romaanttisijmer sonaali dinguloyy -- tini phyaakaashe ek jaarmaan baabaa ebN myylaa ek cile maayyer prsprbirodhii phsl / ei dbait shurur sngge yog krun phraasi shikssaa aar saahityik prekssaaptt, aar aapni abaak hben -- kiNbaa, hyyto, pritusstt o maansikbhaabe tRpt -- taaNr critrer adbhut jttiltaar kthaa shune / syaamuyyeler aache bishuddh, bhruukoNckaano, kaalokphir phoNttaar mtn ckcke dui cokh, uddht o abjnyaachaap naak, behaayyaa kaamuk tthoNtt, cauko sbairaacaarii thutni, aar raaphaayyelke nkl-kraa maathaabhrti cul / --- lokttaa ekisngge bhiissnn als, krunnaa-jaagaano uccaakaangkhii, ebN khyaati-paaoyyaa abhaagaa ; kennaa saaraajiibne uni aadhkhyaaNcrraa dhyaandhaarnnaa chaarraa aar kichui brro ekttaa bhaabte paarenni / kuNrremir ye suury onaar caaripaashe copordin rod chrraayy taa onaake kssiyye diyyechil, aar kheyye phelechil onaake deyyaa sbrger ysaamaany prtibhaar khoraak / pyaariser ei bhyyngkr jiibne aami ye smst aaddek-bishaal maanussder dekhechi, syaamuyyel seisb jmghttiyyaa caalu cijer ceyye beshi-kichu chilen -- duniyyaar baaire ekjn , kheyyaali jiib, yaaNr kbitaa onaar rcnaar ceyye cehaaraayy beshi kholtaai hto, emni ekjn yini, dupur ekttaa naagaad, taap poyyaabaar kyylaar aaguner jhlk aar ghrrir ttikttker maajhe, sb smyy mne hto yen npuNsktaar ekjn debtaa -- ekjn aadhunik, ubhlainggik debtaa --- npuNsktaayy emn bishaal, emn nidaarunn ye taaNke mne hto mhaakaabyik !

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Charles Baudelaire

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"Falderson," he said quietly to Bahzell in passable Navahkan, "is as stupid as the day is long." He craned his neck to gaze up at the hradani and shook his head. "In fact, he's even stupider than I thought. You, sir, are the biggest damned hradani-no offense-I think I've ever seen."

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David Weber

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the general trouble with ignorance is always that ignorant people have no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius. If you're stupid you can always blame miscalculation on bad luck.

stupidity

Louis de Bernières

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"One German-American friend of mine, an architectural historian my own age, can be counted on to excoriate Woodrow Wilson after he has had several strong drinks. He goes on to say that it was Wilson who persuaded this country that it was patriotic to be stupid, to be proud of knowing only one language, of believing that all other cultures were inferior and ridiculous, offensive to God and common sense alike, that artists and teachers and studious persons in general were ninnies when it came to dealing with problems in life that really mattered, and on and on. This friend says that it was a particular misfortune for this country that the German-Americans had achieved such eminence in the arts and education when it was their turn to be scorned from on high. To hate all they did and stood for at that time, which included gymnastics, by the way, was to lobotomize not only the German-Americans but our culture. "That left American football," says my German-American friend, and someone is elected to drive him home."

stupidity woodrow-wilson nationality patriotism ignorance knowledge

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge. Look at the way things are. I'm no fucken genius or anything, but these spazzos are in charge of my every twitch. What I'm starting to think is maybe only the dumb are safe in this world, the ones who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing. But see me? I have to think about every little fucken thing.

stupidity vernon little

D.B.C. Pierre

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[Lynda's mother] You're stupid and you don't know it, you're problem. You talk, talk, talk, all the time. No one wants to listen to an idiot. [Young Lynda] Uh. OK. Thanks, Mom.

stupidity mothers-and-daughters

Lynda Barry

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Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man's confidence in his own wisdom.

stupidity wisdom

Barbara Kingsolver