Quotes about stupidity

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they’ve simply heard of.

Humans do have a knack for choosing precisely those things which are worst for them.

He’s so doggone narrow-minded he could look through a keyhole with both eyes.

“Foolishness,” Ulric Skakki said. “Everything that goes on between men and women is full of foolishness.”

Don’t be dumber than you can help, all right? If you reckon you’re the only one in the world with troubles, what does that make you? Besides a damn fool, I mean?

“Besides, when you’re smoking you can’t smell the goddamn war so much.”

You can’t smell the goddamn war so much. Dowling wouldn’t have put it that way, which didn’t mean the kid was wrong. Even here in Washington, well back of the line, you noted whiffs of that smell. Dowling didn’t know what all went into it. Among the pieces, though, were unburied corpses, unwashed men, and uncovered latrine trenches. Cordite and smoke were two other constants. The smell had a sharper note in this war, for exhaust fumes had largely ousted the barnyard aroma of horses.

And there was one other stink that never went away. It blew out of the War Department. With luck, it blew out of the War Department on the other side, too. And it usually did, for most wars went on for a long, long time. No, there was no escaping the all-invasive, all-pervasive reek of stupidity.

A man who expended power on a whim was a fool.

Hardly anything is more pleasant than talking about why other people are a pack of damn fools.

One of the drawbacks of being President, he’d discovered, was that you couldn’t always call a damn fool a damn fool to his face. Sometimes, no matter how big a damn fool he was, you knew you might need him again one of these days.

“How am I?”

“Except for being a damn fool for wanting to do this in the first place, you’re healthy as a horse,” Freedman answered. “But if they disqualified every damn fool in the Navy, they’d have twenty-seven men left, and how would they win the war then?”

And a pair of albatrosses glided along behind the Remembrance. They really did look almost big enough to land. He wondered what they thought of the great ship. Or were they too birdbrained to think at all?

But this was their home. Men came here only to fight. That being so, who really were the birdbrains here?