Quotes about stupidity

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.The fat woman’s expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.

The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.

We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.

The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!

The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.