Quotes about stupidity

Or maybe I was too suspicious. This business can do that to you. You have to remember to keep it simple. You don’t need to look for the great sinuous, complicated schemes reeking of subterfuge and malice when a little stupidity followed by desperate cover-up efforts will explain everything just as well. And you have to remember to keep an eye out for who stands to gain. That alone will flag your villain eight times out of ten.

"It's politics, sugarpeeps," I said. "It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean."

There is a difference between not understanding and being willfully obtuse.

“What kind of idiot do you think I am?”

”I have no idea what kind of idiot you are,” Miss Jesczenka said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

I belong to the generation of 1968, which, throughout the world, hoped to recast society on the model of the imagination. I have tried to learn from disappointment and defeat, but I have not despaired. "If the fool would persist in his folly," wrote William Blake, "he would become wise."

I’m not on the side of elephants or people, Goma. I’m on the side against stupidity.

We have been clever, and on occasion we have been foolish. For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid. But it was cleverness that brought us to this point, and it is only cleverness that will serve us from now on.

We have no time for anything else.

“But of course, you don’t believe in the existence of sin, do you?”

“I believe in the existence of reckless stupidity,” Rashmika replied.

Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?

“You can hardly blame them.”

“Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.”

“When will they fight?” I asked.

“Tomorrow. Daybreak. It is man’s work.”

I laughed. “I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.”

Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it.