Stupidity

A Quote Collection

 Be sure it’s not you

 

 "When arguing with fools; be absolutely sure that the other person isn't doing the same thing"

-- Abraham Lincoln

 

 "Never argue with fools -- onlookers may not be able to tell the difference." 

-- Mark Twain

 

 "Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood -- we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we." 

-- Jean Rostand

 

Collective

 

 "Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education." 

-- Bertrand Russell

 

 "Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture." 

-- Anthony de Mello

 

 “Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.” 

― John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

 

 "The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it." 

-- Terry Pratchett

 

 "Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity." 

-- Karl Albrecht, Albrecht's Law

 

 "The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury." 

-- Mark Twain

 

 "Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule" 

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 “Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.” 

― Slavoj Žižek

 

It can be huge

 

 "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." 

-- Robert A. Heinlein

 

 "Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match." 

-- Karl Kraus

 

 "Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." 

-- Terry Pratchett

 

 "In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity." 

-- Konrad Adenauer

 

 “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”  

― Albert Einstein

 

Its closeness to evil

 

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

― Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

 

 “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.” 

― Jim Butcher, Vignette

 

 "Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion." 

-- Gustave Flaubert

 

 "Foolish people are never harmless. Stupidity accounts for as many crimes as anger and greed." 

-- Louise Penny

 

 „Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.” 

– Louise Bogan

 

 "Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not." 

-- Anatole France

 

 "Neither a pathology nor an index as such of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor." 

-- Avital Ronell

 

 "Ha az ember csak azért volna felelős, amiről tud, akkor az ostobák eleve mentesülnének minden bűn alól. Csakhogy, kedves Flajsmanom, az embernek kötelessége tudni. Az ember felelős a tudatlanságáért. A tudatlanság bűn." 

-- Milan Kundera

 

 "Sohasem menthető, hogy valaki gonosz, de valami érdem van benne, ha az ember tudja, hogy az; és a legjóvátehetetlenebb bűn: butaságból tenni rosszat." 

-- Charles Baudelaire

 

Do not mix it

 

 "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. 

-- Robert A. Heinlein

 

 "Stupidity trumps Machiavelli almost every time when you are looking for an explanation." 

-- Robert Foster Bennett

 

 “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” 

― Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle

 

 "Ravaszság dolgában a buta ember mindig túltesz az okoson." 

-- Lev Tolsztoj

 

 "Az okos ember előnye, hogy butának tettetheti magát. A fordítottja már sokkal nehezebb." 

-- Kurt Tucholsky

  

Its definitions and features

 

 “Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.” 

― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

 

 "A leggyakoribb ostobaság az, hogy szenvedélyesen hiszünk abban, ami nyilvánvalóan nem igaz. Ez az emberiség legfőbb foglalatossága." 

-- Henry Louis Mencken

 

 "Obstinacy and vehemency in opinion are the surest proofs of stupidity." 

-- Bernard Barton

 

 "Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity." 

-- Frank Leahy

 

 “Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.” 

― Joseph Joubert

 

 "A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side." 

-- Joseph Addison

 

 "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." 

-- Aristotle

 

 "Many wise words are spoken in jest, but they don't compare with the number of stupid words spoken in earnest." 

-- Sam Levenson “You Don't Have to Be in Who's Who to Know What's What: The Choice Wit and Wisdom of Sam Levenson”, p.86

 

 “Irony is wasted on the stupid” 

― Oscar Wilde

 

 "Ultimate stupidity: Mistakenly thinking you will get what you want by complaining about and focusing on exactly what you don't want." 

-- John Phillips

 

 "Solemnity is the shield of idiots." 

-- Baron de Montesquieu

 

 "We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he's doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won't, can't, or doesn't dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can't learn, or be intelligent about, what he's not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere." 

-- Paul Goodman

 

 "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." 

-- Benjamin Franklin

 

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

-- Peter Kreeft

 

 "The line between confidence and arrogance is very fine... And the line between arrogance and stupidity even finer..." 

-- Michael Scott

 

 "There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity." 

-- Johann Wolfgang Goethe

 

 "If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is the father." 

-- Jean de la Bruyere

 

 "Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence." 

-- Nicolas Chamfort

  

And religion

 

 "Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" 

-- Voltaire

 

 “We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.” 

― Christopher Hitchens

 

 "Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect." 

-- Salman Rushdie

 

 "For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." 

-- Aldous Huxley

  

And politics

 

 “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”  

― Napoleon Bonaparte

 

 "The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him." 

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

 

 "Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions." 

-- Jaron Lanier

 

 "The measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity." 

-- R. Scott Bakker

 

 "Profits are not made by differential cleverness, but by differential stupidity." 

-- David Ricardo

 

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

-- Rajneesh

 

 "At great expense, we have built a vast system of inter-connecting stupidities... Why is the competition always so intense to set new records for maximum stupidity?" 

-- Ashleigh Brilliant

 

 "Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation... what's the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?" 

-- Arundhati Roy

 

 "C-H-A-O-S stands for Critical Hate And Overwhelming Stupidity." 

-- Gary Busey

 

 „When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.” 

– Isaac Asimov

 

 “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ’my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.” 

-- Issac Asimov

 

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

-- Gore Vidal

 

 "The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole, it must be destroyed by coercive methods and these will always run the peril of introducing new forms of injustice in place of those abolished." 

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

 

 "Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." 

-- P. J. O'Rourke

 

 "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 all over 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." 

-- Howard Zinn

 

 "We obey people we don't trust, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like, using money we don't have, for gratifications that don't last, killing animals we don't hate, for pleasures that don't satisfy, dreaming of a life we don't deserve, and praying for an afterlife that doesn't exist, we are a stupid species." 

-- Philip Wollen

 

 "Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution -- not a social or political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth." 

-- Simone de Beauvoir

 

Deliberate, unconscious, pretended

 

 "People's ignorance really pisses me off. Stupidity is when you can't help it -- ignorance is when you choose not to understand something." 

-- Sarah McLachlan

 

 "Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance." 

-- William Gaddis

 

 "Stupidity -- unconscious ignorance." 

-- Josh Billings

 

 "But what is much more widespread than the actual stupidity is the playing stupid, turning off your ear, not listening, not seeing." 

-- Frederick Salomon Perls "Gestalt Theory Verbatim", p. 33.

 

 "Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand -- because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do. […] We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes." 

-- Aldous Huxley

 

 “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.” 

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  

Pro stupid

 

 "The folly of one man is the fortune of another." 

-- Francis Bacon

 

 “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.” 

― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

 

 “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.” 

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  

The problem

 

 "A világ tele van ostoba emberekkel, akik mindig tévedhetetlenül azt választják, ami a legrosszabb nekik." 

-- John Vermeulen

 

 "The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest -- weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. [...] 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.'" 

-- Charles Fort

 

 „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.” 

— Charles Richter

 

 "The real difficulty, however, that we all have to face in life is not so much the science of cookery as the stupidity of cooks." 

— Oscar Wilde