Idiocy Quotes

Destruction is easily reversed, Brain drainage howbeit is a civilization killer

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.

Julio Cortázar

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

Neil Postman

Most people do not want to follow a leader, they want to command the leading of a servant.

Justin K. McFarlane Beau

Them Frenchies!’ ‘Unchristian, that’s what I call ’em,’ responded Mr. Stubbs severely. ‘I fair compassionate that wench.

Georgette Heyer

Bravery is absence of contemplation and idiocy is the extinction of it.

M.F. Moonzajer

Six-Pack didn't despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy's boy, and she agreed with Ketchum's assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved--that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim.

John Irving

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?

Quentin Crisp

To recap: it is possible to put decent information into a Government Machine, have ordinary, good people running the thing, and a reasonable system in place, and still get utter idiocy out of the dispenser?""More than possible. Likely.

Nick Harkaway

By this time he had discovered that his neighbour was not very conversible; But whether her silence proceeded from pride, discretion, timidity, or idiotism, he was still unable to decide.

Matthew Lewis

Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.

William Jennings Bryan

Someone. Everyone. Anyone. No-one. One. One can't be everyone, but there isn't more than one everyone, at the same time. And at the same time no-one can't be someone, but anyone can be one, and also anyone can be a no-one. To sum up - everyone is someone, and any-one becomes a no-one if you divide the one part long enough by every part of every-one, so in conclusion, I have no idea what I’m talking about, basically.

Will Advise

I'll make a book on learning how to be a complete moron someday, and I'm sure no one will buy it, because everyone will have mastered that already by the time I gather enough moronism to process it into digestible upgrade instructions for your average village cyborg-idiot.

Will Advise

I'd been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up bantam rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you've got issues with control.

Norah Vincent

To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame

Alfred de Vigny

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

Carl Bernstein

Idiots are of two kinds: those who try to be smart and those who think they are smart.

Raheel Farooq

But it is infamous that they have not told you!’ declared Eustacie. ‘Je n’en reviendrai jamais!’‘If it’s all the same to you, miss, I’d just as soon you’d talk in a Christian language,’ said Mr. Stubbs.

Georgette Heyer

The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of

Bill Maher

Not that I knew who you were until last month. But now that I've got you, I'm not letting you go.""You're not?"Blake stared at her in irritated confusion. What was her game? "Do you think I'm an idiot?" he spat out."No," she said. "I've just escaped from a den of idiots, so I'm well familiar with the breed, and you're something else entirely. I am, however, hoping you're not a terribly good shot.

Julia Quinn

You're an idiot.""I've never claimed to be otherwise.

Cassandra Clare

Idiocy Quotes

Related Topics