Quotes about stupidity
page 15
Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 9
Source: Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996), Chapter 18 (p. 392)
At the Paradiso, Amsterdam; April 24, 1995
Stage banter
“Can I still dunk… Are you stupid?”
Jordan's reply to Jay Leno's question, 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeYisyGV5Hc
Mention made on the Tarocchi in his Capitolo del Gioco della Primiera col Comento di messer Pietropaulo da San Chirico (1526).
Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/p/paycheck.html of Paycheck (2003).
One-and-a-half star reviews
Discourse 32, J. Cohoon and H. Crosby, trans. (1940), p. 177
"Advertisement for 'Games and Ends'", Pt. 5
Advertisements for Myself (1959)
The Corrections (2001)
Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 222
As quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe, Harper-Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 127
1870's
written text with brush, in her paintings JHM no. 4334 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004334/part/character/theme/keyword + 4335 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004335: in 'Life? or Theater..', p. 222-223
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?
Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000), Ch. 36 : The Broken Arrow
"Failure"
Lyrics, Failure (1998)
Quote in Macke's letter to philosopher de:Eberhard Grisebach, March 1913; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145
and "Get Confident, Stupid!".
On the Simpsons, Troy McClure
In the Sunday Telegraph (2 March 1975) ; as quoted in A Speaker's Treasury of Quotations: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0786429453 Maxims, Witticisms and Quips for Speeches and Presentations, Michael & Linda Thomsett, McFarland (2009), p. 110
“We have a date to rumble with stupidity, ignorance, prejudice, laziness, hatred, and greed.”
From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, ACTIVISM
Democratic National Convention Address (1984)
Leoš Janáček: Letters and Reminiscences (Stedron, Bohumir, ed. Translated by Geraldine Thomsen. Prague: Artia, 1995).
Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 154.
Source: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Chapter 15
"Britain is a riot" (11 August 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=9pAC0YSmK0g
2011
“That we usually call Education is making man stupid.”
शिक्षा (Education)
CM Punk — One Life One Chance http://www.onelifeonechance.com/?p=873
Personal
i.e., anything you have to do to receive money
"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"
Source: The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Chapter 5, "The Cruelty of Charity"
“Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.”
"Of Women"
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Studies in Pessimism
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 35
Section 3
The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Barton questioning whether modern-day footballers receive too much media coverage. [August 8, 2007, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/sport/football.html?in_article_id=474623&in_page_id=1779, Barton slams the players who just don't try, Daily Mail, 2007-08-15].
The Naked Communist (1958)
“We’re too stupid to decide on EU (that includes me)”
What good is IQ? http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129
Garden of Tortures
“I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!”
Beneatha to Walter, Act III
A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Page 44
Ender's Game series, First Meetings in the Enderverse (2003), The Polish Boy
"The Death of Common Sense".
Ranting Again
Don't Blame Me https://web.archive.org/web/20120621054133/http://www.georgecarlin.com/home/dontblame.html
Internet, Georgecarlin.com (official website)
Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/willy-wonka-and-the-chocolate-factory-1971 of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1 January 1971)
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God's Earth, and very little escapes their notice. You may not have observed that your neighbor is still using his snow tires in mid-July, but every four-year-old on the block has, and kids pay the same attention to detail when they go to the movies. They don't miss a thing, and they have an instinctive contempt for shoddy and shabby work. I make this observation because nine out of ten children's movies are stupid, witless, and display contempt for their audiences, and that's why kids hate them. Is that all parents want from kids' movies? That they not have anything bad in them? Shouldn't they have something good in them — some life, imagination, fantasy, inventiveness, something to tickle the imagination? If a movie isn't going to do your kids any good, why let them watch it? Just to kill a Saturday afternoon? That shows a subtle kind of contempt for a child's mind, I think. All of this is preface to a simple statement: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is probably the best film of its sort since "The Wizard of Oz." It is everything that family movies usually claim to be, but aren't: Delightful, funny, scary, exciting, and, most of all, a genuine work of imagination. Willy Wonka is such a surely and wonderfully spun fantasy that it works on all kinds of minds, and it is fascinating because, like all classic fantasy, it is fascinated with itself.
“What you know, you don't want to know
You're with stupid now.”
"You're With Stupid Now"
Song lyrics, I'm with Stupid (1995)
Context: Though you pay for the hands they're shaking
The speeches and the mistakes they're making
As they struggle with the undertaking
Of simple thought What you want, you don't know
You're with stupid now
What you know, you don't want to know
You're with stupid now.
Grip interview (1997)
Context: The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, which was my obsession and my compulsion when I was 16 years old. So, behind all of this fame and fortune, there was a seeker, on a spiritual path — a young man who wanted to discover and share with others an alternative way of looking at the world. I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it. And there was the Buddhist way, and the Celtic way.
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 104-105
Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)
Context: The people became convinced—being ignorant, stupid and credulous—that the church held the keys of heaven and hell. The foundation for the most terrible mental tyranny that has existed among men was in this way laid. The Catholic Church enslaved to the extent of its power. It resorted to every possible form of fraud; it perverted every good instinct of the human heart; it rewarded every vice; it resorted to every artifice that ingenuity could devise, to reach the highest round of power. It tortured the accused to make them confess; it tortured witnesses to compel the commission of perjury; it tortured children for the purpose of making them convict their parents; it compelled men to establish their own innocence; it imprisoned without limit; it had the malicious patience to wait; it left the accused without trial, and left them in dungeons until released by death. There is no crime that the Catholic Church did not commit,—no cruelty that it did not practice,—no form of treachery that it did not reward, and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and most powerful enemy of human rights. It did all that organization, cunning, piety, self-denial, heroism, treachery, zeal and brute force could do to enslave the children of men. It was the enemy of intelligence, the assassin of liberty, and the destroyer of progress.
“How stupid and shortsighted the ruling class really is! Cupidity is stone blind. It has no vision.”
The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)
Context: How stupid and shortsighted the ruling class really is! Cupidity is stone blind. It has no vision. The greedy, profit-seeking exploiter cannot see beyond the end of his nose. He can see a chance for an "opening"; he is cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, and how it can be secured, but vision he has none — not the slightest. He knows nothing of the great throbbing world that spreads out in all directions. He has no capacity for literature; no appreciation of art; no soul for beauty. That is the penalty the parasites pay for the violation of the laws of life.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)
Context: Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.
Adam Bede (1859)
Context: These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields — on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
Night of Champions - September 19, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown
Context: I love Chicago. [Crowd cheers] I love the parks, i love Navy Pier, i love the skyline, i love the museums, i love the history, I LOVE CHICAGO! [Crowd cheers] What i hate, what i hate, what i despise... is the inhabitants of Chicago. You! [Points to the crowd] You! [Points to the camera] You [points to the crowd again] ruined my beautiful city! You.. you middle class, lazy teamsters. You corrupt politicians, you corrupt police officers. The horrible horrible Chicago White Sox. The Susie Homemakers who fatten up their children with fast food, and then eat a bottle of pills and pass out on the couch. The out of work dads, you people make me sick! [Crowd boos slightly] I'm proud to live here, i'm proud to be from here, i am not proud to live amongst people like you, you are the scum of the earth, and you have ruined a beautiful city, and that for a second time should be burned to the ground, and in it's ashes, i and i alone will build a Straight-edge utopia. And speaking of fat people that nobody likes, we all saw The Big Show knock me out with his big stupid ham-fist. [Raises fist to camera] And yet, unlike all of you, i don't run away. I stand here on my own two feet, and i stand here defiant. I stand here confident. This is my house, and i run from nobody. Not any of you, not somebody that's a foot taller, not somebody that outweighs me by 250 pounds. Tonight, i am David. And Big Show, he can be Goliath. And my slingshot is the power of almighty Straight-edge!
The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)
Context: If you attack stupidity, you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life, and you will make small progress against it.
Letter XXIV (19 April 1848), ** Part II, Things and Thoughts of Europe, p. 326.
At Home And Abroad (1856)
Context: My friends write to urge my return the talk of our country as the land of the future. It is so, but that spirit which made it all it is of value in my eyes, which gave me all hope with which I can sympathize for that future, is more alive here at present than in America. My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal. In Europe, amid the teachings of adversity, a nobler spirit is struggling — a spirit which cheers and animates mine. I hear earnest words of pure faith and love. I see deeds of brotherhood. This is what makes my America. I do not deeply distrust my country. She is not dead, but in my time she sleepeth, and the spirits of our fathers flame no more, but lies hid beneath the ashes. It will not be so long; bodies cannot live when the soul gets too overgrown with gluttony and falsehood.
Source: Manhood of Humanity (1921), p. 133. Chapter: Capitalistic Era.
Context: To regard human beings as tools — as instruments — for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker — they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.
Source: I, Claudius (1934), Ch. 5.
Context: My tutor I have already mentioned, Marcus Porcius Cato who was, in his own estimation at least, a living embodiment of that ancient Roman virtue which his ancestors had one after the other shown. He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about. He boasted particularly of Cato the Censor, who of all characters in Roman history is to me perhaps the most hateful, as having persistently championed the cause of "ancient virtue" and made it identical in the popular mind with churlishness, pedantry and harshness.
“Me, me, me…myself & I…oh no!!! Trapped in my stupid self!”
From his sketchbook (28 March 1998), reproduced in The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 372
Context: What the hell is this?? Who can tell me?? Does anybody know?? How can I find out more about it?? One thing's sure: the human mind can't "know" it... why does one want to "know"?? Is it a quest for "freedom"? One no longer wishes to be a puppet dancing on the strings of... of what? Animal instincts?? Learned reflexes? Programmed behavior?? Ingrained habits of perception?? How limited are we by the experience of our senses, by our physical nature?? To be fully alive is a stupendous struggle! We want the rewards without the struggle--- ---a fatal error!... No such thing as an easy life! Everybody has a hard time... struggle or die! To find out what's really going on it's necessary to get around the ego.. an art requiring persistent and determined effort... Me, me, me... myself & I... oh no!!! Trapped in my stupid self!
“Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change”
As quoted in Ikkyū and The Crazy Cloud Anthology : A Zen Poet of Medieval Japan (1986) by Sonja Arntzen.
Context: Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.
“Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem.”
Associated Press luncheon http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html#censorship (24 April 1950), New York City, New York
1950s
Context: Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem. Though sometimes necessary, as witness a professional and technical secret that may have a bearing upon the welfare and very safety of this country, we should be very careful in the way we apply it, because in censorship always lurks the very great danger of working to the disadvantage of the American nation.
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.
Source: Taken Care Of (1965), p. 221
Context: There are people, also, who cannot believe that beauty and gaiety are a part of goodness.
When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.
“A stupid person is a person whose values are narrow”
Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 57
Context: When I'm bored, my sense of values goes to sleep. But it's not dead, only asleep. A crisis can wake it up and make the world seem infinitely important and interesting. But what I need to learn is the trick of shaking them awake myself... And incidentally, another name for the sense of values is intelligence. A stupid person is a person whose values are narrow.
On José Mourinho, (November 2005) http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/4398238.stm
Context: He's out of order, disconnected with reality and disrespectful. When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent.
“All men are stupid. They are full of fear and insecurity—it makes them weak.”
Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 13
Context: And now I am going to tell you a great truth, and if you are wise, you will take it to your heart. All men are stupid. They are full of fear and insecurity— it makes them weak. Always the other man seems stronger, more confident, more capable. It is a lie of the worst kind, for we lie to ourselves... How do you know? You do not! You listened to the voice of your inadequacy, and because you believed, you are in my power. If I draw my sword, you are dead!
“I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider — and also FOX News makes people stupider.”
Larry King Live interview (2010)
Context: I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider — and also FOX News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. … We do have two Americas. We have the America that's living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we're in. And then we have this other FOX/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father …
“Getting involved with politicians is complete stupidity.”
Venus in Copper
Context: “I had been right in the first place. Getting involved with politicians is complete stupidity.”
I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.
Source: The Books in My Life (1998), p. 188
The Caesars (c. 361)
Context: "It is the season of the Kronia, during which the god allows us to make merry. But, my dear friend, as I have no talent for amusing or entertaining I must methinks take pains not to talk mere nonsense."
"But, Caesar, can there be anyone so dull and stupid as to take pains over jesting? I always thought that such pleasantries were a relaxation of the mind and a relief from pains and cares."
"Yes, and no doubt your view is correct, but that is not how the matter strikes me. For by nature I have no turn for raillery, or parody, or raising a laugh."
“Stupidity is much the same all the world over.”
Source: The Subjection of Women (1869), Ch. 1
Context: 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.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)
Context: I set an example. That's all anyone can do. I'm sorry the cowgirls didn't pay better attention, but I couldn't force them to notice me. I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it's fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.
Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 173 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
“Nonsense prevails, modesty fails
Grace and virtue turn into stupidity”
All This Useless Beauty
Song lyrics, All This Useless Beauty (1996)
Context: Nonsense prevails, modesty fails
Grace and virtue turn into stupidity
While the calendar fades almost all barricades to a pale compromise
And our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts
They still think they're the gods of antiquity
If something you missed didn't even exist
It was just an ideal — is it such a surprise?
Talks & Dialogues, Saanen (9 July1967) http://www.jkrishnamurti.com/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=41&chid=1, p. 86
1960s
Context: Throughout life, from childhood, from school until we die, we are taught to compare ourselves with another; yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself. In a school, in an ordinary school where there are a lot of boys, when one boy is compared with another who is very clever, who is the head of the class, what is actually taking place? You are destroying the boy. That’s what we are doing throughout life. Now, can I live without comparison — without comparison with anybody? This means there is no high, no low — there is not the one who is superior and the other who is inferior. You are actually what you are and to understand what you are, this process of comparison must come to an end. If I am always comparing myself with some saint or some teacher, some businessman, writer, poet, and all the rest, what has happened to me — what have I done? I only compare in order to gain, in order to achieve, in order to become — but when I don’t compare I am beginning to understand what I am. Beginning to understand what I am is far more fascinating, far more interesting; it goes beyond all this stupid comparison.
(From a 1963 letter to his wife Gweneth, written while attending a gravity conference in Communist-era Warsaw.)
"Letters, Photos, and Drawings," p. 90-91
What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)
Context: The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity — and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Voltaire (1916)
Context: Valiantly he fought on every intellectual battlefield. True he bowed and dodged and lied over and over again, that he still might live and work. Many of his admirers cannot forgive this in the great Voltaire. Rather they would have had him, like Bruno and Servetus, remain steadfast to his faith while his living body was consumed with flames. But, Voltaire was Voltaire, Bruno was Bruno, and Servetus was Servetus. It is not for the world to judge, but to crown them all alike. Each and all lived out their own being, did their work in their own way, and carried a reluctant, stupid humanity to greater possibilities and grander heights.
Tinselworm (2008)
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
Context: And who would not risk its terrors to gain its raptures? Ah, what raptures they were! The mere recollection thrills you. How delicious it was to tell her that you loved her, that you lived for her, that you would die for her! How you did rave, to be sure, what floods of extravagant nonsense you poured forth, and oh, how cruel it was of her to pretend not to believe you! In what awe you stood of her! How miserable you were when you had offended her! And yet, how pleasant to be bullied by her and to sue for pardon without having the slightest notion of what your fault was! How dark the world was when she snubbed you, as she often did, the little rogue, just to see you look wretched; how sunny when she smiled! How jealous you were of every one about her! How you hated every man she shook hands with, every woman she kissed—the maid that did her hair, the boy that cleaned her shoes, the dog she nursed—though you had to be respectful to the last-named! How you looked forward to seeing her, how stupid you were when you did see her, staring at her without saying a word! How impossible it was for you to go out at any time of the day or night without finding yourself eventually opposite her windows!
Quantum Psychology : How Brain Software Programs You and Your World (1990), p. 45
Context: Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.
Resistance to new information, however, has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan.
Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 18
Context: "I had a teacher... He said there were three kinds of people in life: winners, losers and fighters. Winners made him sick with their arrogance, losers made him sick with their whining, and fighters made him sick with their stupidity." "In which category did he put himself?" "He said he had tried all three and nothing suited him." "Well, at least he tried. That's all a man can do, Lake. And we shall try."
Part Troll (2004)
"The Brooklyn Divines." Brooklyn Union (Brooklyn, NY), 1883.
1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)
Context: I began gradually to perceive this immense fact, which I really advise every one of you who read history to look out for and read for—if he has not found it—it was that the kings of England all the way from the Norman Conquest down to the times of Charles I. had appointed, so far as they knew, those who deserved to be appointed, peers. They were all Royal men, with minds full of justice and valour and humanity, and all kinds of qualities that are good for men to have who ought to rule over others. Then their genealogy was remarkable—and there is a great deal more in genealogies than is generally believed at present. I never heard tell of any clever man that came out of entirely stupid people. If you look around the families of your acquaintance, you will see such cases in all directions. I know that it has been the case in mine. I can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and the family stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of them, so that it goes for a great deal—the hereditary principle in Government as in other things; and it must be recognised so soon as there is any fixity in things.
Source: Going Bovine (2009), p. 389
Context: Marisol does a silly dance with Balder and the screw, one in each hand, so that nobody gets the idea that she takes tins — or anything else, for that matter — seriously. And just like that, something in the cosmos shifts. A butterfly flaps its wings in South America. Snow falls in Chicago. You give an idiot a stupid magic screw and it turns out to be a necessary part after all.
Philo to Cleanthes, Part V<!--pp. 106-107-->
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Context: But were this world ever so perfect a production, it must still remain uncertain, whether all the excellencies of the work can justly be ascribed to the workman. If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost; many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. In such subjects, who can determine, where the truth; nay, who can conjecture where the probability, lies; amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed, and a still greater number which may be imagined?
The Reactionary Temptation (2017)
Context: You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.
Reaction can be clarifying if it helps us better understand the huge challenges we now face. But reaction by itself cannot help us manage the world we live in today — which is the only place that matters. You start with where you are, not where you were or where you want to be. There are no utopias in the future or Gardens of Eden in our past. There is just now — in all its incoherent, groaning, volatile messiness. Our job, like everyone before us, is to keep our nerve and make the best of it.