“And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?”

“There is a difference between idiot and stupid, the idiot is stupid but stupid can not be an idiot.”

“I looked at him like he was an idiot, but he didn’t notice. Or maybe he got it so often, he thought that was how people looked at him.”

“She could feel the hot tears pouring down her face, and she pressed it against the stone. MacGowan, you stupid bastard, she thought. Why did you have to go and get yourself killed? I care about you.Care about you. Stupid phrase. She knew the truth, and right then the least she could do for the man who’d died protecting her was to admit it. She was stupidly, idiotically in love with him. He didn’t deserve it, she was smart enough to know better, but all the rationalization in the world didn’t help. It simply was.”

“Einstein’s remark on the limitlessness of human stupidity is made even more disturbing by the discovery that infinity comes in different sizes. Answering ‘How much stupider?’ or trying to measure the minimal idiocy bounded by an IQ test are mysteries which are themselves infinitely less alarming than simply attempting to tally the anti-savant population. One can count all the natural idiots (they’re the same as the even number of idiots – twice as many), but the number of real idiots continues forever: all the counting idiots (finger reckoners) plus all the fractional idiots (geniuses on a bad day) plus all the irrational idiots (they go on and on and on) add up to a world in which the approaching upper limit of our set of natural resources has its complement in the inexhaustible lower limit of our set of mental ones.”

“Lawyers make nothing but confusion... A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right.”