Dumbness Quotes

You've got to lose your passion for dumbness. ~ Bob Dylan

Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,' said Treebeard; 'they mostly concern Elves and Men. That is the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about the future. I do not like worrying about the future. I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them, not even Elves nowadays. Still, I take more kindly to Elves than to others: it was the Elves that cured us of dumbness long ago, and that was a great gift that cannot be forgotten, though our ways have parted since. And ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The downward spiral of Dumbness in America is about to hit a new low. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds ~ W.G. Sebald

As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial. ~ Anton Chekhov

No dumbness should be rewarded ~ Kambiz Shabankare

Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer.

"I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb," he told Rob. ~ Jeff Hobbs

All human behaviour, language, thoughts, feelings, actions, and consciousness emerge from this massively interconnected network of neurons. Each neuron is pretty dumb; it either fires in a certain situation or it doesn't, but out of this mass dumbness comes great cleverness. ~ Trevor Harley

I may be deprived of eloquence, but my mind can never be a dumb. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Dumbness and silence are two different things. ~ George Iles

No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can't you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn't hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proferred sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That's how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock. ~ Olivia Laing

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.

Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways.

This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls.

Listen to some of these stats: ~ Bill Maher

You can see the latest dumbness as just the end of a long line of dumbnesses that have been taking place for thousands of years. ~ J. B. Handelsman

Silence prevailed everywhere, like the gloomy dumbness after the riots in the city. ~ Girdhar Joshi

I lean against my sister's shoulder. "I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice."

"Sure it does," Izzy tells me. "But only if you're too dumb to move. ~ Jodi Picoult

All this to say of course Gallo wants to get into your Little Mermaid panties. And if you don't get that, you're dumber than I ever thought, which gives me such a headache to even contemplate. The massive amount of your dumbness. It hurts me,' he whined. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

Once I knew nothing about McKay and now I knew everything about him. This seemed as good as any reason for not walking out the door. There are so many ways to stop the knowing, and I tried them all. I tried silence, I tried heroin, I tried calling it love. And then I stopped trying to call my dumbness any one of ten thousand names. ~ Alice Hoffman

No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit. ~ Theodor Adorno

A veil of pretense can definitely conceal your dumbness but then it assures the proliferation of your dumbness instead of stagnating it by seeking knowledge from others. ~ Ayesha

the blindest people think
they can see the most ~ Dahi Tamara Koch

Another case for the dumbness of reading, however, is that books do not contain answers, but rather pose more questions. And asking questions makes you look dumber, not smarter.
I thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would be a delightful romp through a child's subconscious, but while reading it I started to ask questions like "How do you really speak to other humans when our language often means the opposite of what is intended?" and "How do I really know anyone?" And so on, until I was asking the question "Why even exist at all?"
That didn't make me smarter! That made me wish for death, and being dead looks way dumber than being alive. ~ Dan Wilbur

Close? ah, he is close! He can hold his tongue well. That man's dumbness is wonderful to listen to."
"There's so much sense in it. Every moment of it is brimmen over wi' sound understanding. ~ Thomas Hardy

I don't know how a reporter would ever understand a politician. Your job is supposed to be about finding the truth and enlightening people. Right? A politician's job is about hiding the truth and fooling people. Right? You want us to be better informed so we get smarter. They think we're dumb and it's to their advantage to keep us that way. ~ Dan Groat

Shrewdness in public life all over the world is always honored, while honesty in public men is generally attributed to dumbness and is seldom rewarded. ~ Will Rogers

It may well be that we, spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it
and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence. ~ David Foster Wallace

Unbelievable," I murmured. "After four thousand years, I am still discovering new things."
"Like how dumb you are," Meg volunteered.
"No."
"So you already knew that? ~ Rick Riordan

Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door
a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness. ~ Bob Dylan

The Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness combined to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife ... ~ Robert Penn Warren

I have a big problem with people who glamorize dumbness and demonize education and intellect. And I'm giving a pretty good description of Sarah Palin right now. ~ Aaron Sorkin

Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it. ~ Criss Jami

Oh, I know, I know, she was a sweet girl, a simple country girl; everyone told me that, both then and since. But I could not forgive her animal dumbness - worse, her rank sensuality, easy as any cow's, and like her dumpling breasts, quite irresistable to men - while those of us whom God has made to think and feel, who are strung out like harps along the wires of our own nature, why, we are rarer than music and must content ourselves with smaller audiences. ~ Rosalind Miles

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

You'll finally realize the importance of the spark of that diamond when you lost it. ~ RSCruz

The only thing wrong with the NBA - or any other professional sport, for that matter - is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules. ~ Hunter S. Thompson