This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
The superstition that all our hours of work are a minus quantity in the happiness of life, and all the hours of idleness are plus ones, is a most ludicrous and pernicious doctrine, and its greatest support comes from our not taking sufficient trouble, not making a real effort, to make work as near pleasure as it can be.
Idleness | Pleasure | Superstition | Work | Happiness |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.
Honesty | Intelligence | Stupidity | System |
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
In politics stupidity is not a handicap.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
We are made weak both by idleness and distrust of ourselves. Unfortunate, indeed, is he who suffers from both. If he is a mere individual he becomes nothing; if he is a king he is lost.
Distrust | Idleness | Individual |
But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.
Culture | Friend | Ignorance | Stupidity | Technology |
It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! [...] Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence — by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle. (Tesla at the end of his dream for Wardenclyffe)
Adolescence | Better | Humanity | Invention | Past | Present | Stupidity | Trials | World |
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Oh, the beautiful utopia, the lovely Christmas dream we can make as soon as we admit that those who govern represent a superior caste, and have hardly any or no knowledge of simple mortals' weaknesses! It would then suffice to make them control one another in hierarchical fashion, to let them exchange fifty papers, at most, among different administrators, when the wind blows down a tree on the national road. Or, if need be, they would have only to be valued at their proper worth, during elections, by those same masses of mortals which are supposed to be endowed with all stupidity in their mutual relations but become wisdom itself when they have to elect their masters.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
I've lived a very long life, and I've seen a lot of stupidity. But very little of it beats the stupidity with which we have been downsizingÂ…Don't be surprised that morale is very low. The contempt for top management is dreadful. And the present generation of management is not going to regain the trust of their people. It is our greatest disadvantage in this country today.
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
Give me the boy who rouses when he is praised, who profits when he is encouraged and who cries when he is defeated. Such a boy will be fired by ambition; he will be stung by reproach, and animated by preference; never shall I apprehend any bad consequences from idleness in such a boy.
Consequences | Idleness | Will |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole, it must be destroyed by coercive methods and these will always run the peril of introducing new forms of injustice in place of those abolished.
Enough | Good | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Peril | Power | Sacrifice | Stupidity | Will |
Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation, and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profiteth others and ourselves.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Abstract | Cause | Government | Question | Stupidity | Will | Government |
The difference between genius and stupidity is that even genius has its limits.
Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.