66 Quotes About Stupidity

In a world that often seems overwhelmed by the rapid influx of information, it's easy for the lines between wisdom and foolishness to blur. Stupidity, in its many forms, is a theme that has long captured the attention of thinkers, writers, and humorists alike. Throughout history, the absurdities of human nature have inspired countless individuals to pen their thoughts, provoking reflection, laughter, and perhaps a bit of chagrin. In this curated collection, we explore the top 66 quotes about stupidity, each offering a unique perspective on the oft-pondered quirks of human behavior. Whether you seek insight or a bit of levity, these quotes promise to engage and entertain, shining a light on the baffling yet humorous aspects of our shared human experience.

1. “I've learned one thing, and that's to quit worrying about stupid things. You have four years to be irresponsible here, relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember the time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So stay out late. Go out with your friends on a Tuesday when you have a paper due on Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does...” - Tom Petty

2. “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” - Søren Kierkegaard

3. “Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.” - Joseph Joubert

4. “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” - Robert A. Heinlein

5. “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."[Thoughts on Various Subjects]” - Jonathan Swift

6. “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” - Frank Zappa

7. “The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

8. “[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.” - Stephen W. Hawking

9. “Honestly, if you were any slower, you’d be going backward.” - J.K. Rowling

10. “He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.” - P.G. Wodehouse

11. “I'll take crazy over stupid any day.” - Joss Whedon

12. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. ” - Adam Smith

13. “If it is stupid but it works, it isn't stupid. (a Shin'a'in saying)” - Mercedes Lackey

14. “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.” - John Steinbeck

15. “If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.” - Jane Austen

16. “People do not read stupidities with impunity.” - Victor Hugo

17. “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.” - William Faulkner

18. “I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.” - Orson Scott Card

19. “If you're gonna be stupid you gotta be tough.” - John Grisham

20. “In the aftermath of the recent wave action in the Indian Ocean, even the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williamson [sic], proved himself a latter-day Voltairean by whimpering that he could see how this might shake belief in a friendly creator. Williamson is of course a notorious fool, who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep, but even so, one is forced to rub one's eyes in astonishment. Is it possible that a grown man could live so long and still have his personal composure, not to mention his lifetime job description, upset by a large ripple of seawater?” - Christopher Hitchens

21. “Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.” - Lois McMaster Bujold

22. “I thought Candy Mountain was a real place” - Sarah Martin

23. “When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…” - Christopher Hitchens

24. “So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.” - Christopher Hitchens

25. “We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way.” - Christopher Hitchens

26. “Smart people have the brains, but stupid people have the balls” - Ana

27. “If there were a master of stupidity in this world, I would really love to listen to his success story.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

28. “Longbottom, if brains were gold, you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something.” - J.K. Rowling

29. “People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.” - Richard Ford

30. “Irony is wasted on the stupid” - Oscar Wilde

31. “I said you lie, knave!” shouted Beaumains, drawing his sword. “And for telling such craven falsehoods, you must die!”The knight looked plaintively at Roger. “What’s wrong with this fellow?”“He was dropped on his head when he was a baby,” answered Roger.” - Gerald Morris

32. “Well, let's see. There's—of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others. But, um.” - Sarah Palin

33. “A fool tries to shut others' mouth instead of listens to his own heart.” - Toba Beta

34. “If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.” - Kurt Vonnegut

35. “All the inane, meaningless noises people make that pass for intelligent conversation. They might as well be pigs grunting in the pen. (92)” - Norma Fox Mazer

36. “Stupidity isn't punishable by death. If it was, there would be a hell of a population drop.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

37. “I doubt you can understand the magnitude of the stupidity in your statement” - Robert Jordan

38. “Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

39. “Silk is a fine, delicate, soft, illuminating, beautiful substance. But you can never rip it! If a man takes this tender silk and attempts to tear it, and cannot tear it, is he in his right mind to say "This silk is fake! I thought it was soft, I thought it was delicate, but look, I cannot even tear it" ? Surely, this man is not in his right mind! The silk is not fake! This silk is 100% real. It's the man who is stupid!” - C. JoyBell C.

40. “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.” - Friedrich von Schiller

41. “I swear, talking to you is like talking to a really good-looking and mildly stupid brick wall.” - Derek Landy

42. “And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.” - Leo Tolstoy

43. “Will this be in the examination, Mr Hecker?" was the limit of my students' interest in any given subject. If it was going to be in the test they took notes, if it was not going to be in the test they did not take notes. Their silent, depthless stares were unnerving. I told myself that they were not stupid - for how could the final attainment of thousands of years of human progress be stupid?” - Tod Wodicka

44. “I know who I am. Bloody hell, I'm getting enough bills for Karl Pilkington so I hope I am him, 'cos if I'm not, I have no idea who I'm paying for.” - Karl Pilkington

45. “Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.” - Iain Pears

46. “Johannes had once said that violence and cruelty were just a stupid person's way of making himself felt, because it was easer to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to the problem.” - Anne Holm

47. “The belief that the world was created yesterday seems to hold great appeal to those born at that time.” - Gary Malone

48. “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.” - Blaise Pascal

49. “Our lives are businesses that are sometimes run by idiots.” - Patrick Reinken

50. “Could mankind declare it was truly wise? Did man know everything on earth, or would he ever? Certainly not!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

51. “Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.” - Tammara Webber

52. “It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.” - Jerome K. Jerome

53. “When we see that almost everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing no effort and encountering a thousand toils and dangers in the process, has, in the end, no further object than to raise themselves in the estimation of others; when we see that not only offices, titles, decorations, but also wealth, nay, even knowledge[1] and art, are striven for only to obtain, as the ultimate goal of all effort, greater respect from one's fellowmen,—is not this a lamentable proof of the extent to which human folly can go?” - Arthur Schopenhauer

54. “All three combined is...a different kind of stupid formerly unheard of by humankind.” - Veronica Roth

55. “Men are pigs, darling. I really have every sympathy for women that they actually have to choose one of these arrogant, stupid morons to settle down with and marry.” - Michael Winner

56. “Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.” - Simon Kuper

57. “Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.Pequenino: While collectively...Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.Hive Queen: Exactly.” - Orson Scott Card

58. “Kate was never going to understand the extent to which men were stupid.” - Chris Pavone

59. “You can't fix stupid” - R. Alan Woods

60. “Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.” - Stephen Vizinczey

61. “The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.” - Chuck Palahniuk

62. “You can not argue with stupid but you can certainly play with it.” - Donna Lynn Hope

63. “Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.” - Alexander Berkman

64. “CUSTOMER: I don’t know why she wants it, but my wife asked for a copy of The Dinosaur Cookbook.BOOKSELLER: The Dinah Shore Cookbook?” - Jen Campbell

65. “Careful, Mr. Spiro, guns are dangerous. Especially the end with the hole.” - Eoin Colfer

66. “El idiota cree que todos son idiotas menos él.” - Ryunosuke Akutagawa