Quotes About Stupidity

What I lack is proof to the contrary, sir. I ain't seen it yet, in all my years. What do you think makes criminals in the first place?' 'Stupidity and greed.' 'Besides those? I'll tell you. It's looking around, real carefully. It's seeing what's really there, and who wins every time, and it's deciding that despair tastes like shit. It's deciding to do whatever it takes to sneak through, to win what you can for yourself.

In my 20s, I used to have a lot more energy! I was this skydiving, bungee-jumping adrenaline junkie. I don't know what happened to me! Now that I'm in my early 30s, I've put all that energy into my work, although I'm still a little ridiculous. In your 30s, you're sensible enough to know better, but still stupid enough to do stupid things.

I'm a meathead. I can't help it, man. You've got smart people and you've got dumb people.

It wasn't the dying. He had seen men die all his life, and death was the luck of the chance, the price you eventually paid. What was worse was the stupidity. The appalling sick stupidity that was so bad you thought sometimes you would go suddenly, violently, completely insane just having to watch it. It was a deadly thing to be thinking on. Job to be done here. And all of it turns on faith.

Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.

In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, such as the philosopher Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good and think it has the power to make us wise and happy.

Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mere stupidity.

One must be a little foolish if one does not want to be even more stupid.

The living have a simple choice. They can pay a high penalty for believing their lies—sheer stupidity!—or laugh at themselves and be happy.

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

I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

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

Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.

I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means i ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Suspending moral judgement 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. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgement is legitimate, but that she refuses it a place in the novel.

Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the non-thought of received ideas.

The only thing that lasts longer than a friend's love is the stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better.

That wasn't love; that was stupidity.

While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has body and its stupidity.

Love makes you stupid. Love makes you weak. Love will kill you all one day, and it's going to kill you today.

Such pathetic Lives they lead, Erasmus thought, without formal education or awareness. But even the lowliest of them might possess the tremendous potential to be a great human genius. Lack of opportunities did not necessarily make an individual stupid, but only shifted his intelligence to a form suited to survival rather than creativity.

It's good to be here. I'm just trying to go through life without looking stupid. It's not working out too well.

Malcolm J. Moldowsky could see the ugliness unfolding. It would take all his subterranean talents to save the sugar bill, and he couldn't do it if Dilbeck got caught in a sex scandal. After years of slithering through political gutters, Moldowsky was still amazed at how primevally stupid most politicians could be, on any given night.