Stupidity Quotes - Page 26

• For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Fighting, Government, Knavery

  "The New Freedom".

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• The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.

  Walter Bagehot

  People, Cynical, Liberty

  Walter Bagehot (1974). “The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot: The political essays”

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• And if you think my acts are foolishness the foolishness may be in a fool's eye.

  Sophocles

  Eye, Thinking, May

  "Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus".

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• The fool knows after he has suffered.

  Hesiod

  Fool, Knows

  Hesiod (1991). “My Brother's Killer”, p.45, University of Michigan Press

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• He is a fool who tries to match his strength with the stronger.

  Hesiod

  Trying, Stronger, Fool

  Hesiod (1991). “My Brother's Killer”, p.43, University of Michigan Press

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• Sandy: Boy, you must really think I'm stupid or something. Jeff: Ahh, no one would call you stupid, to your face.

  Teri Garr

  Stupid, Boys, Thinking

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• Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

  William of Ockham

  Occam's Razor, Entity

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• Several years ago we had an intern who was none too swift. One day he was typing and turned to a secretary and said, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?" "Just use copier machine paper," she told him. With that, the intern took his last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five blank copies.

  Dave Barry

  God, Years, One Day

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• The more I know, the more I know that I don't know.

  Socrates

  Knows

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• More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

  William Wulf

  Names, Sin, Blind

  "A Case Against the GOTO," Proceedings of the 25th National ACM Conference, (pp. 791-797), August 1972.

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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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• Religious and racial persecution is moronic at all times, perhaps the most idiotic of human stupidities.

  Harry S. Truman

  Religious, Presidential, Church

  Harry S. Truman (2015). “Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman”, p.146, New Word City

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• Man thinks his mind's love for world power and his heart's love for world peace can live together. Indeed, this is the height of man's stupidity.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Peace, Heart, Men

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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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• The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.

  Barney Frank

  War, Iraq, Problem

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• 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.

  Leslie Ford

  Bystanders, Hands, Ideas

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• The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Tired, Vanity

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.1043, GENERAL PRESS

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• 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.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Quality, Looks

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.77, Macmillan

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• I wronged him, Katra. Greatly. I had the entire world in my hand at one time and I didn’t know it. I let stupidity blind me and I lost him because of that. (Artemis) Then tell him you’re sorry. (Kat) As your father would say, there are some things ‘sorry’ can’t repair. Some pains run too deep to ever be healed by something as simple as words, no matter how much you mean them. (Artemis)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Running, Sorry, Pain

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• Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it.

  Adolf Hitler

  Religious, Fighting, Catholic Religion

  Adolf Hitler (1998). “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him.

  Albert Einstein

  Children, Regret, Religion

  Letter to Edgar Meyer, January 2, 1915.

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• There is a chalk outline slowly being drawn around common sense and most people can't identify the victim.

  Dennis Miller

  Fear, People, Common Sense

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• To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life.

  Denis Diderot

  Pain, Fear, Ignorance

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• One of the most stupid things to do is to pretend you are smart. When you pretend to be smart, you are at the height of stupidity.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Inspirational, Smart, Stupid

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• 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.

  Rajneesh

  Frustration, Law, Frustrated

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