“‘Attitudes aren’t so different in America,’ I told Francis. ‘You are probably right,’ he said. ‘But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.’”
“People love getting into spats on the internet. Some people spend their whole lives doing it. The only people who object to ridicule and criticism are touchy, fragile celebrities and journalists with brittle egos who can’t cope with readers pointing out how biased and stupid they are.”
“After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island [of Britain] submitted to the Roman yoke.”
“It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions”
“We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting lollipop or a toy bear’d worth of comfort.”
“I entered Excessive Modesty Mode. Nothing is stupider and more ineffective than Excessive Modesty Mode. It is a mode in which you show that you’re modest by arguing with someone who is trying to compliment you. Essentially, you are going out of your way to try to convince someone that you’re a jerk.”
“But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we /must/ stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.”
“In order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.”
“A long time ago, people used to tell magical stories of wonder and enchantment. Those stories were called Fairy Tales. Those stories are not in this book. The stories in this book are almost Fairy Tales. But not quite. The stories in this book are Fairly Stupid Tales.”
″ ‘You are a stupid little girl!’ Mrs. Winter said.
‘I am not a stupid little girl!’ I cried. ‘I am a very nice little girl!’
‘Go and stand in the corner,; Mrs. Winter said.
Then I got cross, and I saw red, and I put the Magic Finger on Mrs. Winter good and strong, and almost at once …”
“Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person’s way of making himself felt because it was easier to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to a problem.”
″‘Don’t be sillier than you were born,’ said Inez with patient scorn. ‘Enoque and Honorio are garimpeiros. They’re gold-miners. It’s all they know about. They don’t have a brain between them to do anything else.’
‘Then they’re mining for gold!’
“The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”
“You’re no saint, because saints are stupid! You’re stupid! You’re so stupid that you can’t think ahead! You think that sacrificing your life for a bunch of scabby, snot-nosed orphans is going to save them from slavery? You’re out of your mind!”
“I can’t go to sleep. The music’s turned up and the arguments have started. There’s something funny about the night that makes grown-ups go stupid and call each other names. Maybe it’s their way of scaring off the Hairyman. Maybe it’s just the grog in them.”
“This book has twelve stories about Polly and how she always managed to escape from the wolf by being cleverer than he was- which wasn’t very difficult because he was generally not at all clever. In fact he was rather stupid.”
“I gave up growing when I was extremely small, along with all the other nasty childish habits like laziness and disobedience and greed and sloppiness and untidiness and stupidity.”
For, remember, Mowgli, I, who am the Black Panther, was forced to call upon Kaa for protection, and Baloo and I were both made stupid as little birds by the Hunger Dance.
“With this idiotic, purely physical weakness, depending on the sunset or something, one can’t help doing something stupid! You’ll go to Dounia, as well as to Sonia,” he muttered bitterly.