Stupidity Quotes - Page 17

• Some people get rich studying artificial intelligence. Me, I make money studying natural stupidity.

  Carl Icahn

  Money, People, Entrepreneur

  "Carl Icahn buys stake in Botox-maker Allergan", www.theguardian.com. May 31, 2016.

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• Stupidity is not another form of knowledge.

  Bill Maher

  Form

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• Consider me the entity within the industry without a history of spitting the epitome of stupidity.

  Talib Kweli

  Rap, Hip Hop, Epitome

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• The country will some day pay for the stupidities of those who were in the majority on this commission. They know as much about the future of aviation as they do about the sign writing of the Aztecs.

  Jimmy Doolittle

  Country, Writing, Majority

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• It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.

  C. S. Lewis

  Poverty, Humans, Overwork

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• I couldn't catch a ball or any of that stuff. I could do only what required brute stupidity.

  Warren G. Harding

  Climbing, Balls, Stuff

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• If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Photography, Art, Real

  1859 'Salon of 1859', section 2, in Curiosites Esthetiques (1868).

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• I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

  David Foster Wallace

  Thinking, People, Confusion

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• Simplicity is not the same as stupidity

  Steve Jordan

  Simplicity

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• Stupidity is not my strong suit.

  Paul Valery

  Strong, Suits

  "Monsieur Teste". Book by Paul Valery, 1919.

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• It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.

  William Hazlitt

  Exercise, Opportunity, Thinking

  "Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners". Book by William Hazlitt. Chapter: "On Will-Making", 1822.

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• It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

  Karl Marx

  Tired, Fighting, Hair

  Karl Marx (1975). “Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works”, International Pub

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• Having a diverse sense of taste - or lack of taste - I loved so many different things. I was drawn to the stupidity and excitement of glam, I had a thorough upbringing in rhythm and blues.

  Paul Westerberg

  Rhythm And Blues, Different, Taste

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Flower, Silly, Book

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• The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.

  Andre Gide

  Perseverance, Men, Hands

  Andre Gide (2017). “Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality”, p.289, Routledge

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• Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Clouds, Glasses, Views

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.8, Harvard University Press

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• Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, - forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.

  Gilbert Highet

  Wind, Water, Sloth

  Gilbert Highet (1976). “The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning”, Random House Incorporated

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

  Evan Esar

  Common Sense, Kind, Thousand

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

  Milan Kundera

  Views, Evil, Judging

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

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

  Alain de Botton

  Law, Ideas, Errors

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

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

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Death, Determination, Men

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• When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Stupid, Thinking

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.201, Routledge

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

  Louis Aragon

  Police, Musician, Arms

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• We can no longer ignore the stupidity of the hits that are still happening today despite the fact that the players know the concussion aspect is such a big part of the game and sports in general.

  Jeremy Roenick

  Sports, Player, Nhl

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• My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

  Woody Allen

  Writing, People, Mind

  Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. August 13, 2008.

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