“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”
“If more government is the answer, then it was a really stupid question.”
“Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.”
“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”
Source: The Magic Mountain
“I swear, talking to you is like talking to a really good-looking and mildly stupid brick wall.”
Source: Death Bringer
“Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.”
Source: Interesting Times
“Anger is stupid, and stupidity will kill you more surely than your opponent's blade.”
Source: Dragon Bones
“It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Time does to the body what stupidity does to the soul”
Source: Marina
“Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.”
“The enemy isn't men, or women, it's bloody stupid people and no one has the right to be stupid.”
Source: Monstrous Regiment
“If that isn't typical male stupidity! If something doesn't work, kick it or swear at it!”
Variant: Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
As Quote Investigator explains, allegories about animals doing impossible things have been incredibly popular in the past century. But no, this one isn't from Einstein. (Source: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/.)
Misattributed
Variant: Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
“I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
graveyard.”
Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
“This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.”
Source: The Angel's Game
“This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
Source: The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
“But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”
Source: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
“A word to the wise ain't necessary, it's the stupid ones who need advice.”
“The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.”
“Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.”
Source: Sceptical Essays
Source: The Last Olympian
“She would have kissed him, if she kissed stupid men.”
Source: Trickster's Queen
“You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public”
From a personal conversation, quoted from memory by Maxim Gorky in "V.I. Lenin" (1924) http://www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/1924/01/x01.htm <!-- first edition -->
Attributions
Context: I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devillishly difficult job!
Address to Republican National Convention http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1988/081588b.htm. (15 August 1988)
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)
Variant: Facts are stupid things — stubborn things, I should say.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), p. 13.
Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)
Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 9 (p. 88)
(Hiawatha seemed to think so,
Seemed to think it not unlikely.)</p>
Hiawatha's Photographing
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)
The News Quiz, BBC Radio 4, July 1997 (rebroadcast on BBC 7, 23 July 1999)
Variant: It seems a shallow observation, but… the Tory Conference are not an attractive lot, are they? I mean, if all those people were born in the same village, you'd blame pollution, wouldn't you?
“In general, "historical necessity" turns out to be merely a name for human stupidity.”
Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1992)
“Regulations are for the stupid.”
Quoted in, The Silences of Hammerstein http://www.amazon.com/The-Silences-Hammerstein-Seagull-Books/dp/1906497222
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
"El mundo atribuye sus infortunios a las conspiraciones y maquinaciones de grandes malvados. Entiendo que se subestima la estupidez."
Breve diccionario del argentino exquisito, 1978.
Part II “Phoenix” chapter 15 (p. 381).
Adulthood Rites (1988)
“Stupid people, people who do not know how to laugh, are always pompous and self-conceited.”
Sketches and Travels in London; Mr. Brown's Letters to His Nephew: "On Love, Marriage, Men and Women" (1856).
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Discussion with Jacob Burckhardt, League of Nation commissioner. Quoted in Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion pg. 126 https://books.google.com/books?id=1nPPbpXUZA0C&pg=PA126&dq=hitler+is+against+russia+the+west&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjR3PP6n5bXAhVC6CYKHTKJB3EQ6AEISjAG#v=onepage&q=hitler%20is%20against%20russia%20the%20west&f=false
1930s
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
“Nothing conveys the feeling of infinity as much as stupidity does.”
Motto of Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (Tales from the Vienna Wood) (1931).
Quoted in History Channel 5-part series "The Wehrmacht" in the episode "The Crimes".
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Often known as Hanlon's razor, this was attributed to Napoleon without source in Message Passing Server Internals (2003) by Bill Blunden, p. 15, ISBN 0071416382
Misattributed
Theory of Knowledge (1913)
1910s
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
“An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.”
Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941)
1960s, Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master (1961)
Picture to Burn, written by Taylor Swift and Liz Rose.
Song lyrics, Taylor Swift (2006)
“Soviet propaganda is remarkably effective and the Americans are even more remarkably stupid.”
As quoted in Asadollah Alam (1991), The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran's Royal Court, 1968-77, page 508
Attributed
“My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.”
Ibid., p. 101
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Os meus sonhos são um refúgio estúpido, como um guarda-chuva contra um raio.
The Satanic Bible (1969)
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
Source: Wilde, Oscar, (1891 / 1912) The Soul of Man Under Socialism, London, Arthur L. Humphreys. Retrieved from University of California Libraries Archive.org https://archive.org 13 February 2018 https://archive.org/details/soulofmanunderso00wildiala
Untitled last poem found after his death; translation from Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975) vol. 4, p. 235
Freeman (1948), p. 155
C. G. Jung. 2014. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. p. 71
Stupid Girls, written by Pink, Billy Mann and Nikey Olovson & Robin Lynch
Song lyrics, I'm Not Dead (2006)
“What do people like to call stupid the most? Something sensible that they can’t understand.”
Was nennen die Menschen am liebsten dumm? Das Gescheite, das sie nicht verstehen.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 37.
