Michel De Montaigne quote: “A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity.”

“Burden not the back of Aries, Leo, or Taurus, with thy faults, nor make Saturn, Mars, or Venus, guilty of thy Follies.”

Thomas Browne book Christian Morals

Part III, Section VII
Christian Morals (first pub. post. 1716)

“What would you say of that man who was made king by the error of the people, if he had so far forgotten his natural condition as to imagine that this kingdom was due to him, that he deserved it, and that it belonged to him of right? You would marvel at his stupidity and folly.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition?
Discourses on the Condition of the Great

“In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”

Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Graduation Exercises at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, U.S. (3 June 1947) http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html
1940s
Context: War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington — not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict.

“And should we not be guilty of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages which we cannot obtain otherwise, merely because they involve a greater gain to others than to ourselves?”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 25

“For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?”
Quid enim foedius auaritia, quid immanius libidine, quid contemptius timiditate, quid abiectius tarditate et stultitia dici potest?

Marcus Tullius Cicero book De Legibus

Book I, section 51; (Translation by C.D. Yonge) http://books.google.com/books?id=AdAIAAAAQAAJ&q=%22For+what+is+there+more+hideous+than+avarice+more+brutal+than+lust+more+contemptible+than+cowardice+more+base+than+stupidity+and%22&pg=PA420#v=onepage
De Legibus (On the Laws)

“This refusal to listen was a form of stupidity that Martha especially abhorred, and she considered Miles well punished for it. If he had ever taken seriously her passionate desire to leave him, she might not (she now believed) have been driven in practice to show him how little indeed he knew. To pay attention, for Martha, was the prime human virtue; without it, there could be no dignity and no reciprocity.”

Mary McCarthy book A Charmed Life

Source: A Charmed Life (1955), Ch. 5, p. 594

“What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 5 : 'Sex', p. 157
Context: The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it.

“There is nothing in Lacan which is not stupid, no exceptions to stupidity, so that what makes him not totally stupid is only the very inconsistency of his stupidity.”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Less Than Nothing (2012)

“What would you say of that man who was made king by the error of the people, if he had so far forgotten his natural condition as to imagine that this kingdom was due to him, that he deserved it, and that it belonged to him of right? You would marvel at his stupidity and folly. But is there less in the people of rank who live in so strange a forgetfulness of their natural condition?”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Discourses on the Condition of the Great

“A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity.”

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