Intellectual Idiots Quotes

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Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it. - The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
Ray Bradbury (The October Country)
We're so different. You're an intellectual. I'm an idiot." "Don't say that," I yelled. "You're not an idiot, you stupid idiot.
Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi)
Too much elite education renders a person unpractical. And tell you what? The highly educated people are further away from reality than the less educated ones. I would rather rely on the opinion of a less educated poor person who constantly deals with people, than an overly educated idiot who views this world only through an academic lens while sitting alone on his comfy couch.
Abhaidev (The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit)
By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.
Dermot Davis (Brain: The Man Who Wrote the Book That Changed the World)
If a fourteen year-old can deliver your message, it's not because he's gifted. It's because intellectually, you're a child.
Bill Maher
Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god.
William Lane Craig
Only idiots are confident. It requires a great amount of wisdom and knowledge to be confused.
Abhishek Leela Pandey
If culture did not filter, it would be inane — as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.
Umberto Eco
What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything. There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.
Walter Kaufmann (Critique of Religion and Philosophy)
You are surrounded by ignorance, savagery and fanaticism. You live in a society where everyone thinks he/she knows about everything in the whole universe. If you find yourself among those intellectual idiots, then being good and humble may give rise to doubts in your mind about your own ideas. So, you must first learn to distinguish between real and shallow intellect. Then, as a self- preservation tactic, you need to let your pretence of arrogance grow as big as a Dinosaur, so that the fake intellectuals start to realize their true inferiority in front of you.
Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
The real problem of the world is that the number of the current idiots is much greater than the intellectuals of the past decade all together.
Kambiz Shabankare
The great mistake of contemporary life is that we have made such a virtue of intellectual growth while almost totally ignoring the necessity of conscience growth. We have failed to understand that individual evolution can take place not only in mental but in moral power. The earth tragically today is full of people who remain fixated on a childish level of conscience. What an illusion has blinded the human race: that our conscience is given to us once and for all at birth and we ourselves have to do little or nothing about it…The truth is that our moral capacity is purely potential and needs strenuous training, education and development. It is certainly not an organic power that comes to us at birth, like breathing, which demands little attention from us as long as we live…A revolution has to take place in our thinking about morality. We have to become as sensitive about being moral morons as we are now anxious about being intellectual idiots.
Joshua Loth Liebman (Hope for Man: an optimistic philosophy and guide to self-fulfillment)
I’ve been surrounded by nitwits my entire life.
Chelsea Ballinger (Sinners & Saints (Sinners & Saints, #1))
An idiot person is more dangerous than a trained criminal
Mohsen Ali
Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots.
Chelsea G. Summers (A Certain Hunger)
As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.
Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
But judgment’s like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the better it gets. It has nothing to do with intellect or genius; so-called stupid people can exercise good judgment, just as intellectuals can behave like idiots.
Helen Yeomans (Owen's Day: Risking his life was just the beginning)
Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral; it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare to define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don’t know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying’, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, ’ I feel like tears.’ And this phrase -so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! The small child aptly defined his spiral. To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming- like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
Alexander the Magnus was once called to solve the following challenge in the Phrygian city of Gordium (as usual with Greek stories, in modern-day Turkey). When he entered Gordium, he found an old wagon, its yoke tied with a multitude of knots, all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to figure out how they were fastened. An oracle had declared that he who would untie the knot would rule all of what was then called “Asia,” that is, Asia Minor, the Levant, and the Middle East. After wrestling with the knot, the Magnus drew back from the lump of gnarled ropes, then made a proclamation that it didn’t matter for the prophecy how the tangle was to be unraveled. He then drew his sword and, with a single stroke, cut the knot in half. No “successful” academic could ever afford to follow such a policy. And no Intellectual Yet Idiot. It took medicine a long time to realize that when a patient shows up with a headache, it is much better to give him aspirin or recommend a good night’s sleep than do brain surgery, although the latter appears to be more “scientific.” But most “consultants” and others paid by the hour are not there yet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.
M.J. Nicholls (The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die)
The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.
Joe Dixon (Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President)
The vast majority is sociologically intellectual and respectful but realistically idiotic and despicable.
Daniel Marques
It is often asserted that “the West” has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.
Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others)
I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people [people at Tea Party rallies, ed]. It's never been just political, it's personal. I'm not convinced anyone in this country except the kinds of weenies who thought student council was important really cares about large versus small government or strict constructionalism versus judicial activism. The ostensible issues are just code words in an ugly snarl of class resentment, anti-intellectualism, old-school snobbery, racism, and who knows what else - grudges left over from the Civil War, the sixties, gym class. The Tea Party likes to cite a poll showing that their members are wealthier and better educated than te general populace, but to me they mostly looked like the same people I'd had to listen to in countless dive bars railing against "edjumicated idiots" and explaining exactly how Nostradamus predicted 9/11, the very people I and everyone I know fled our hometowns to get away from. So far all my interactions at the rally were only reinforcing my private theory - I suppose you might call it a prejudice - that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It's the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also account for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized - Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just di further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo.
Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing)
The idiots take over the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, "experts", and "specialists" busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy. There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
During Rosemary’s childhood, the distinction between the intellectually disabled and the mentally ill was rarely made. Instead, according to psychological definitions of the day, “idiots” were the most severely disabled, classified as those with the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old or younger; “imbeciles” as those with a three- to eight-year-old mental capacity; and “morons” as those with an eight- to twelve-year-old capacity. These labels limited society’s understanding of people with intellectual and physical disabilities, and lacked nuanced interpretation of the causes and conditions of various disabilities, including the many types of simple and complex learning disorders.
Kate Clifford Larson (Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter)
When Love becomes a command, Hatred can become a pleasure. *  *  * if you don’t gamble, you’ll never win *  *  * Beautiful thoughts, and beautiful women never last *  *  * you can cage a tiger but you’re never sure he’s broken. Men are easier *  *  * if you want to know where God is, ask a drunk. *  *  * there aren’t any angels in the foxholes *  *  * no pain means the end of feeling; each of our joys is a bargain with the devil. *  *  * the difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable *  *  * I’d rather hear about a live American bum than a dead Greek God. *  *  * there is nothing as boring as the truth *  *  * The well balanced individual is insane *  *  * Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot *  *  * a brave man lacks imagination. Cowardice is usually caused by lack of proper diet. *  *  * sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing *  *  * when men rule governments, men won’t need governments; until then we are screwed *  *  * an intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way. *  *  * everytime I go to a funeral I feel as if I had eaten puffed wheat germ *  *  * dripping faucets, farts of passion, flat tires — are all sadder than death. *  *  * if you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence
Charles Bukowski (Notes of a Dirty Old Man)
Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right—gun rights hysteria, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally used to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right.
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
Well—Bible school, Poland, it was a long time ago. Still. Because, what I am trying to say—what I was thinking in the car from Antwerp last night—good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions. Scary idea! Remember Prince Myshkin in The Idiot?” “I’m not really up for an intellectual talk right now.” “I know, I know, but hear me out. You read The Idiot, right? Right. Well, ‘Idiot’ was very disturbing book to me. In fact it was so disturbing I have never really read very many fictions after, apart from Dragon Tattoo kind of thing. Because”—I was trying to interject—“well, maybe you can tell me about that later, what you thought, but let me tell you why I found it disturbing. Because all Myshkin ever did was good… unselfish… he treated all persons with understanding and compassion and what resulted from this goodness? Murder! Disaster! I used to worry about this a lot. Lie awake at night and worry! Because—why? How could this be? I read that book like three times, thinking I wasn’t understanding right. Myshkin was kind, loved everyone, he was tender, always forgave, he never did a wrong thing—but he trusted all the wrong people, made all bad decisions, hurt everyone around him. Very dark message to this book. ‘Why be good.’ But—this is what took hold on me last night, riding here in the car. What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
Intellectual capital includes everything an organization knows. That can be ideas, different kinds of knowledge, and innovations. The bottom line, though, is that it’s knowledge that an organization can turn into profit.
Melissie Clemmons Rumizen (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Knowledge Management (The Complete Idiot's Guide))
I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…
Cathleen Falsani (Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace)
The text of the murderer perfectly expresses the feelings and opinions of a large portion of the European people, not to mention Americans. These opinions are not the product of madness or of a crazy delirium, but the rational neo-conservative elaborations of a right-wing idiot who thinks that European identity is based on the Christian faith and that Islam is the worst enemy of Europe, which has to be confronted and rejected by any means necessary. What Breivik writes might be signed in full and almost without correction by the neo-conservative intellectuals and the Tea Party militants of the United States.
Anonymous
Religion is a natural phenomenon of the human mind, but today, in the hands of theoretical bloodsucking religious preachers it has become a lifeless mockery. Now is the time that you take back religion from those intellectual idiots and place it where it belongs, in the temple of your inner cosmos.
Abhijit Naskar
idiots' were the most severely disabled, classified as those with the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old or younger; 'imbeciles' as those with a three- to eight-year-old mental capacity; and 'morons' as those with and eight- to twelve-year-old capacity. These labels limited society’s understanding of people with intellectual and physical disabilities.
Kate Clifford Larson (Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter)
We’ve confused freedom of religion with the notion that any behavior or statement, no matter how idiotic or onerous, carries an inherent legitimacy, as long as it’s grounded in someone’s faith. For all our technical sophistication, when it comes to the subject of religion, we’re so mired in ignorance and superstition we might as well be running around in animal skins, sacrificing goats, and throwing virgins into volcanoes. Chronologically this may be the 21st century, but intellectually it’s the Dark Ages. A
Ian Gurvitz (WELCOME TO DUMBFUCKISTAN: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America)
There has always been an element of stupidity in America, only now it’s become a valid intellectual stance. Fact has been relegated to just another opinion. Voices that, at one time in our history, would have been laughed off the national stage have now been afforded mainstream legitimacy. Idiotic remarks that would have been walked back when the speaker sobered up are now backed up with even more bluster than when they were uttered. Even racist and sexist taunts proudly ride in under the false banner of flouting political correctness.
Ian Gurvitz (WELCOME TO DUMBFUCKISTAN: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America)
Under relentless prosecutorial grilling he sputtered that he had earlier deceived investigators “because I was an idiot,” and he finally admitted that he had lied about nothing less than a treasonable overture. That lie he could not explain — but Bird and Sherwin attempt to explain it by citing a remark Oppenheimer made five years earlier to a Communist graduate student and friend of his, in which he admitted “his tendency when things get too much” to blurt out “irrational things.” How difficult it must have been for an intellectual of his abilities, pride, and accomplishment to make such an admission ordinary men can only imagine.
Algis Valiunas
If the human race has ever invented an institution more effective in the propagation of intellectual and ethical cripples than the nobility, I have yet to stumble across it. Take the progeny of a half millennium of inbred idiots, first cousins, and hemophiliacs. Raise them via a series of bloated wet nurses, drink-addled confessors, and failed academics, because Śakra knows Mommy and Daddy are too busy diddling themselves at court to take a hand in the upbringing of a child. Ensure any youthful training they receive extends to nothing more practical than swordsmanship and the study of languages no longer spoken, grant them a fortune upon the attainment of their majority, place them outside the bounds of any legal system more developed than the code duello, add the general human instinct toward sloth, avarice, and bigotry, stir thoroughly and, voilà—you have the aristocracy.
Daniel Polansky (Low Town (Low Town, #1))
Pak Yoo was a different person in English than in Korean. In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity. Before moving to America, he'd prepared himself for the difficulties he knew he'd experience: the logical awkwardness of translating his thoughts before speaking, the intellectual taxation of figuring out words from context, the physical challenge of shaping his tongue into unfamiliar positions to make sounds that didn't exist in Korean. But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech and, like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself. In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect. In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept. A bah-bo.
Angie Kim
Try to fancy poor Jesus, for example, coming to life again (actually, not doctrinally), and learning that he was the founder, the teacher, the exemplar, the very God of Christendom; fancy him searching for some trait of his own life and ruling principles in the lives and ruling principles of the millions who call themselves Christians; fancy him in spiritual communion with the Pope, the cardinals, the bishops (though their lackeys would never admit him to the presence of any of these), the most prominent ministers of the various Christian sects. He would find himself an outcast in his nominal kingdom, denounced and reviled as a madman, an idiot, an impostor; the moral and intellectual life of Christendom would be as alien and bewildering to him as its steamboats and railways and telegraphs. Paul and the other early apostles, the ancient heathenisms of Greece and Rome, of the East and the West, old philosophies and older superstitions, national characteristics, physical and other circumstances, the growth of science, the ever-varying conditions of life and modes of thought; everything, in brief, affecting the character of the converts, has affected the religion. By the time a doctrine gets embodied in a Church or other institution, its original spirit has nearly vanished. Its progress may be well compared to the course of a great river, rivers being remarkably convenient things for all such analogies. Some remotest mountain–rill or rocky well–spring has the honour of being termed its source; and the name of this tiny trickling is borne triumphant down a thousand broadening leagues to the sea. The rill is soon joined by others, each very like itself. As it flows onward, ever descending (for this is the universal law), it is joined by streamlets and rivers more and more unlike itself, they having flowed through unlike soils and regions; and more than one may be greater than itself, as the Missouri is greater than the Mississippi; and its own original waters are more and more modified by the new and various districts they traverse. As it proceeds, growing deeper and wider, villages and towns arise on its banks, and it receives copious tribute not merely of natural streams, but likewise of sewage and the pestilent refuse abominations of manifold factories and wharves. When it is become a mighty river, crowded with ships and bordered by some wealthy and populous capital, it may be a mere open cloaca maxima; and at any rate it must be as dissimilar in the quality of its waters as in their quantity and surroundings from the pure rill of the mountain solitudes, from the pure brook of the woodland shadows and pastoral peace. The waters actually from the fountain-head are but an insignificant drop in the vast and composite volumes of the thick bronze or yellow flood which finally disembogues through fat flat lowlands, in several devious channels with broad stretches of marsh and lagoon, into the immense purifying laboratory of the untainted salt sea. The remote rill-source is Christ or Mohammed, the mighty river is the Christian or Mohammedan Church; the sea in all cases is the encompassing ocean of death and oblivion, which makes life possible by preserving the earth from putrefaction.
James Thomson
Anyone who has read enough, explored enough and experienced enough, somewhere in his/ her life will realize that the life is repeating itself again and again and again. He/she will soon understand there is nothing new to discover, all quests of human life have been experience and discovered in the past and all we do to play the game over and over to gain a different result, like an idiot who watches movie several time and hope to see a different ending. In such age, people no to remain enthusiastic, they need to still be excited about the story, which they have heard more than millions of times. Hence, intellectuals and creators create new toys for them. The toys that practically has the same purpose and affect the same result, but ordinary human does not need to know that. They need to be interested to play, because if we stop, the world will stop, and then the age of nothingness will end. And we cannot let that happen can we?
kambiz shabankareh
Unfortunately, Ms. Palin is hardly the only passenger on the intellectual short bus. Going right from her Election Day loss, she immediately became the hard-core right’s drum majorette, leading a parade of folksy, old-timey stupidity into the American conversation. And that stupidity has taken root, not merely as another side in the debate, but in many respects, setting the narrative. It not only laid the groundwork for the Tea Party, but has infected all branches of government, from the lowliest Texas school board idiot who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, right up to a late Supreme Court Justice. In
Ian Gurvitz (WELCOME TO DUMBFUCKISTAN: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America)
It is because of the church’s diversity that the followers of Christ were first called Christians in Antioch. You could not call them Jews or Gentiles, for both were in the church. You could not label them wealthy or poor, intellectuals or idiots, because the church was made up from all categories of humanity. The only thing that all these diverse people had in common was Christ, and therefore that was the only title you could give them: Christians. Jesus
John S. Leonard (Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Every Day)
If the human race has ever invented an institution more effective in the propagation of intellectual and ethical cripples than the nobility, I have yet to stumble across it. Take the progeny of a half millennium of inbred idiots, first cousins, and hemophiliacs. Raise them via a series of bloated wet nurses, drink-addled confessors, and failed academics, because Śakra knows Mommy and Daddy are too busy diddling themselves at court to take a hand in the upbringing of a child. Ensure any youthful training they receive extends to nothing more practical than swordsmanship and the study of languages no longer spoken, grant them a fortune upon the attainment of their majority, place them outside the bounds of any legal system more developed than the code duello, add the general human instinct toward sloth, avarice, and bigotry, stir thoroughly and, voilà—you have the aristocracy
Daniel Polansky (Low Town (Low Town, #1))
The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for the corporatists that preach the free market and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
British intellectual idiots often glorify the Empire by drawing example of India. They say, before the British came to India, it was a land of warring tribes. To them I say, the Indus valley civilization has quite literally provided the world with more thinkers, philosophers and reformers than any other nation in the world. Indians were making jaw-dropping advancements in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy, when the Brits were just beginning to learn farming. The list will never end if we start recording the involvement of India, Arabia and China in the course of humankind's progress, just like the entire electrified and connected world will fall into chaos, if we went back in history and erased one Serbian scientist from the timeline, Nikola Tesla.
Abhijit Naskar (Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race)
We all have some idiot ancestor. All of us, at some point in our lives, discover the trace, the flickering vestige of our dimmest ancestor, and upon gazing at the elusive visage we realize, with astonishment, incredulity, horror, that we’re staring at our own face winking and grinning at us from the bottom of a pit. This exercise tends to be depressing and wounding to our self-esteem, but it can also be extremely salutary. My idiot ancestor was called Bolano (Bolanus) and he appears in the first book of Horace’s Satires, IX, in which Bolano accosts the poet as he walks along the Via Sacra. Says Horace: “Suddenly a fellow whom I knew only by name dashed up and seized me by the hand. ‘My dear chap,’ he said ‘how are things?’ ‘Quite nicely at the moment thanks,’ I said. ‘Well, all the best!’ He remained in pursuit, so I nipped in quickly: ‘Was there something else?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should get to know me. I’m an intellectual.’ ‘Good for you!’ I said.” What follows is a tiresome stroll for Horace, since he can’t shake Bolano, who ceaselessly offers advice, praising his own work and even his talent for singing. When Horace asks if he has a mother or family to care for him, Bolano answers that he’s buried them all and he’s alone in the world. Lucky for them, thinks Horace. And he says: “That leaves me. So finish me off! A sinister doom is approaching which an old Sabine fortune-teller foresaw when I was a boy.” The walk, nevertheless, continues. Bolano then confesses that’s he’s out on bail and must appear in court, and he asks Horace to lend him a hand. Horace, of course, refuses. Then a third person appears and Horace tries in vain to slip away. It must be added, in Bolano’s defense, that this new character, Aristius Fuscus, a dandy of the era, is just as much an idiot as Bolano and actually is Horace’s friend. In the end, it’s Aristius Fuscus who accompanies Bolano to his appointment with the law. There’s no moral to this story. We all have an idiot ancestor. He’s a specter, but he’s also our brother, and he lives deep inside each of us under different names that express our degree of implication in the crime: fear, ridicule, indifference, blindness, cruelty.
Roberto Bolaño (Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003)
The intellectual idiots don't understand anything simple, unless it is presented in their savage ism-istic fashion. That's why I coined the term "gentalist" in my last work - to refer to the individuals with an insurmountable concern for people over isms - over all sorts of sectarianism. To put it simply, a gentalist is just a plain human whose foremost priority is to be human, above all cultural, political, religious, intellectual and ideological barbarism. In fact, every gentalist is a human, but not every human is a gentalist.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work)
Denise was there when I got to Rachel's room, and we didn't really have anything to say to each other, so we both awkwardly sat there for a while. I felt like I should leave, but I knew that would make me feel even worse. Rachel wasn't awake. She had pneumonia, apparently. I really wanted Rachel to wake up. In retrospect, this was stupid and pointless, because I had nothing to say to her, but I just wanted to talk to her again. I sat there staring at her for like an hour. Her frizzy hair was gone, and her mouth was closed, so I couldn't see her sort of big teeth. And her eyes were closed, so I couldn't see them, either. So you'd think the person lying there wouldn't have looked like Rachel at all, but somehow she did. Actually I was crying the whole time, because for some reason it had never really sunk in with me that she was dying, and now I was literally watching her die, and it was somehow different. There was just something about her drying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you, and then when it does, that's when you feel like shit. So like an idiot, I hadn't understood until I was sitting there actually watching her physically die, when it was too late to say or do anything. I couldn't believe it had taken me so long to understand it even a little bit. This was a human being, dying. This was the only time there was going to be someone with those eyes and those ears and that way of breathing through her mouth and that way of building up right before a monster laugh with her eyebrows all raised and her nostrils flaring a little bit, this was the only time there was ever going to be that person, living in this world, and now that was almost over, and I couldn't deal with it.
Jesse Andrews (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl)
Honor He Wrote Sonnet 53 Better a marvelheaded idiot, Than a marbleheaded bigot. Better a self-proclaimed dope, Than an arrogant dilettante. Better a kindhearted commoner, Than a cockeyed intellectualist. Better an egalitarian infidel, Than a dogmatizing evangelist. All dogmas are born in the mind, So is the duster to wipe them. It is up to you what will you be, Vessel of dogma or the duster untamed! Convert none, help all, without imposition. Let uplift be the motive behind all conviction.
Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts,” and “specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore, and fantasy.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
Instead, according to psychological definitions of the day, “idiots” were the most severely disabled, classified as those with the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old or younger; “imbeciles” as those with a three- to eight-year-old mental capacity; and “morons” as those with an eight- to twelve-year-old capacity.
Kate Clifford Larson (Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter)
Since, on the other hand, anyone plunging stubbornly into all this literature cannot resist the impression that though he encounters fragments of perhaps brilliant intellectual constructions, these fragments are mixed indiscriminately with the products of utter foolishness bordering on insanity, as an antithesis to the concept of the “oceanic yogi” there arose the idea of the “oceanic idiot.
Stanisław Lem (Solaris)
Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts,” and “specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore, and fantasy. There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
Exploring the thoughts (too generous of a word, really) of these ideological madmen (and madwomen) is a somber sojourn into a world of stupidity, an exercise in self-immolation. It is a waste—fruitless, useless, depressing, damaging. The amount of time and energy needed to adequately understand and then explain and convey these idiotic ideas is plainly not worth the human investment and spiritual grief. The practitioners of the ideas in this chapter and the one that follows—especially the perverse men of the Frankfurt School—were intellectually and spiritually vapid. Their notions were inane, yes, but they were also dark. Indeed, it would not be so bad if their ideas were just dumb. Their ideological nostrums were toxic, sometimes literally deadly, and poisonous to the soul. At
Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
Conspiracy theories encourage the masses to believe in lurid nonsense and to denounce intellectuals, who are supposedly all in on the conspiracy and hard at work to deceive and enslave the people. But mediocrities, so we are to believe, can see through all intellectual bullshit … they know experts are idiots. Here we have the Dunning-Kruger effect in full flow, shining like the dumbest star in the sky, the one that hovered above that grubby stable in Bethlehem.
David Sinclair (Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes: Individualism Versus Collectivism)
We are all idiots. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can behave wise.
Abhijit Naskar (Divane Dynamite: Only truth in the cosmos is love)
If it was just historians on their own, then I’d be considering that because everyone knows they’re a bunch of overeducated, intellectually stunted idiots with delusions of adequacy,
Jodi Taylor (Why is Nothing Ever Simple?)
I knew that these people were not idiots, so the only thing I could attribute their insane response to was a profound lack of courage and intellectual integrity.
Patrick Lencioni (Getting Naked: A Business Fable about Shedding the Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty)
Be silent & you are considered on idiot. Be voluble & you are considered a nuisance. The perfect balance between speaking and remaining silent makes you a gentleman!
Uma Shanker
Philosophies by mankind and the ideology of the so-called intellectuals are the perfect cause to address humans as an idiot, if a Dualistic God existed.
Vishal Chipkar (Enter Heaven)
Body is visible but the soul is invisible and hence intellectuals give importance to invisible matters but idiots give importance to visible ones.
Dr Sivakumar Gowder
Intellectual Fascism – 2/3 Take, by way of illustration, two well-educated, presumably liberal, intelligent people in our culture who are arguing with each other about some point. What, out of irritation and disgust, is one likely to call the other? A "filthy black," a "dirty Jew bastard," or a "black-eyed runt"? Heavens, no. But a "stupid idiot," a "nincompoop," a "misinformed numbskull"? By all means, yes. And will the note of venom, of utter despisement that is in the detractor's voice, be any different from that in the voice of the out-and-out fascist with his racial, religious, and political epithets? Honestly, now: will it? Suppose the individual against whom a well-educated, presumably liberal, intelligent person aims scorn actually is stupid, or misinformed. Is this a crime? Should he, perforce, curl up and die because he is so afflicted? Is she an utterly worthless, valueless blackguard for not possessing the degree of intelligence and knowledge that her detractor thinks she should possess? And yet - let us be ruthlessly honest with ourselves, now! - isn't this exactly what the presumably liberal person is saying and implying - that the individual whose traits she dislikes doesn't deserve to live? Isn't this what we (for it is not hard to recognize our own image here, is it?) frequently are alleging when we argue with, criticize, and judge others in our everyday living? The facts, in regard to higher-order fascism, are just as clear as those in regard to lower-order prejudice. For just as everyone in our society cannot be, except through the process of arbitrary genocide or "eugenic" elimination, Aryan, or tall, or white, so cannot everyone be bright, or artistically talented, or successful in some profession. In fact, even if we deliberately bred only higher intelligent and artistically endowed individuals to each other, and forced the rest of the human race to die off, we still would be far from obtaining a race of universal achievers: since, by definition, topflight achievement can only be attained by a relatively few leaders in most fields of endeavour, and is a "relative" rather than an "absolute" possibility. The implicit goals of intellectual fascism, then, are, at least in today's world, impractical and utopian. Everyone cannot be endowed with artistic or intellectual genius; only a small minority can be. And if we demand that all be in that minority, to what are we automatically condemning those who clearly cannot be? Obviously: to being blamed and despised for their "deficiencies"; to being lower-class citizens; to having self-hatred and minimal self-acceptance. Even this, however, hardly plumbs the inherent viciousness of intellectual fascism. For whereas lower-order or politico-economic fascism at least serves as a form of neurotic defensiveness for those who uphold its tenets, higher-order fascism fails to provide such defences and actually destroys them. Thus, politico-social fascists believe that others are to be despised for not having certain "desirable" traits - but that they are not to be applauded for having them. From a psychological standpoint, they compensate for their own underlying feelings of inadequacy by insisting that they are super-adequate and those who are not like them are subhumans. Intellectual Fascists start out with a similar assumption but more often than not get blown to bits by their own homemade explosives. For although they can at first assume that they are bright, talented, and potentially achieving, they must eventually prove that they are. Because, in the last analysis, they tend to define talent and intelligence in terms of concrete achievement, and because outstanding achievement in our society is mathematically restricted to a few, they rarely can have real confidence in their own possession of the values they have "arbitrarily deified".
Albert Ellis
Luck in life is self-generated. You see more when you know more. You get more if you work more. But the billions of people on this planet will disagree with what I just said and invent some idiotic theory to comfort their ignorance on what life truly is. In fact, they will deny any of your efforts, and the harder you work, the more they will question your morality and claim some special secret to your results that they too could get if they knew about it. The average person is so immersed in their own ego that they can't possibly grasp all the unimaginable parts of reality. Reality is largely inaccessible and therefore unreal. The more you talk about it, the less you are understood, the more you are seen as a madman. Because those who don't know have to comfort their ignorance for lack of better options. Eventually, there comes a point in life when no explanation can sustain what you had before, including your ability to explain yourself to others. In fact, the more you say or try to explain, the more jealousy and slander you get. It is predestined that the more one works to better himself, the more hatred he receives from the vast masses of mediocre minds. Isolation is then not a choice, but a fate that precedes extraordinary success. One must experience it for one's own sanity, but also to fulfill what one has planted in one's soul. It must happen that the people who change the world the most are the most hated by the same people they help. As such, we must then assume that friends are for fools, as fertilizer is for plants. A real person is hardly understood by the masses. He is lucky if he finds a real friend. But as soon as he realizes that his friend is on the same intellectual level as he is, even that is proven to be predestined.
Dan Desmarques
Phobia of Wikipedia *** It bothers me nothing that If silly ones of Wikipedia Decline my notability. Whereas scholars, academics, Intellectuals and visionary ones Acknowledge, admire, and appreciate More than only the notability Since the world's geniuses, philosophers Notable personas do not require internet Wikipedia or such websites Factually, Wikipedia is nothing.  Other than a phobia that Rides on the minds of celebrities, Writers, poets, authors, and others To be on the Wiki article for notability As a reality, the academic world Rejects its reliability and quality. One realizes its articles stay the same. Years and years, or each movement Changing its shape and content By the idiots, fools, having no other job Wasting and killing their time on Wikipedia For self-ego, self-vanity, and self-editor Without qualification for that The free labour of its founder, who Benefits and enjoys millions of dollars For a comfortable life The stupidity prevails without resistance.
Ehsan Sehgal