Dunces Quotes

Rebukes are easy from our betters,
From men of quality and letters;
But when low dunces will affront,
What man alive can stand the brunt? ~ Jonathan Swift

It is unclear if corporate governments are truly the dunces of human health or if they are just faking it in order to propagate a biologically toxic agenda on an unsuspecting global population. ~ Steven Magee

ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The basis of your religion is injustice. The Son of God the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty. This proves his heroism, but no more does away with man's sin than a school boy's volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate a dunce from negligence. ~ Lord Byron

It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

But you are a charming and beautiful dunces, madame. And," he continued in French, "a charming and beautiful woman
can get away with murder. Can you imagine that any man here would prosecute you for assassinating our language? ~ Loretta Chase

When, on your dangerous mission gone,
You underrate our foes as dunces,
Be wary, not of sudden gun,
But of your partner at the dances. ~ Stanley Kunitz

Fool beckons fool, and dunce awakens dunce. ~ Charles Churchill

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain. ~ James Carlos Blake

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite. ~ George Eliot

The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists. ~ Ivan Turgenev

At school where you a dunce or a teacher's pet? All of the above. I was stupid so they thought I was cute. ~ Dave Grohl

I have known several persons of great fame for wisdom in public affairs and councils governed by foolish servants. I have known great ministers, distinguished for wit and learning, who preferred none but dunces. I have known men of valor cowards to their wives. I have known men of cunning perpetually cheated. I knew three ministers who would exactly compute and settle the accounts of a kingdom, wholly ignorant of their own economy. ~ Horace Walpole

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers
or should I say, nurses?
will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us. ~ C.S. Lewis

Jail was preferable. There they only limited you physically. In a mental ward they tampered with your soul and worldview and mind. ~ John Kennedy Toole

A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits. ~ Alexander Pope

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him. ~ Jonathan Swift

We are next informed that bookworms, a term which seems to be held applicable to whoever has the smallest tincture of book-knowledge, may not be good at bodily exercises, or have the habits of gentlemen. This is a very common line of remark with dunces of condition; but whatever the dunces may think, they have no monopoly of either gentlemanly habits or bodily activity. ~ John Stuart Mill

Not all celebrities are dunces. ~ Carroll O'Connor

Paugh!" the troll scoffed. "Romance. Kissing and folly. Where's the story, where's the philosophy? I'm a troll, and even I can't rip a bodice. You should read real literature. The classics." He held up a book called Ye Olde Clubbe of Fisticuffs. "This is one of my favorites. It's all about, like, rejecting capitalism." He held up another, the spine as yet uncracked, called Alliance of Nincompoops. "Or this one, about a misunderstood genius. You should read it. I'd love to chat about what the true meaning of success is when we're living in a world that values looks instead of substance. ~ Delilah S. Dawson

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

There is no dunce like a mature dunce. ~ George Santayana

Who pepper'd the highest was surest to please. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Heaven and earth fight in vain against a dunce! ~ Friedrich Schiller

What am I then ... ? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity and old age all have brought me their thoughts ... their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In fame's temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels, or successful butchers of the human race. ~ Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me? ~ John Kennedy Toole

What passes for wine among us, is not the juice of the grape. It is an adulterous mixture, brewed up of nauseous ingredients, by dunces, who are bunglers in the art of poison-making; and yet we, and our forefathers, are and have been poisoned by this cursed drench, without taste or flavour - The only genuine and wholesome beveridge in England, is London porter, and Dorchester table-beer; but as for your ale and your gin, your cyder and your perry, and all the trashy family of made wines, I detest them as infernal compositions, contrived for the destruction of the human species. ~ Tobias Smollett

The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result. ~ Donald Harington

When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric. ~ Jonathan Swift

When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life. ~ John Kennedy Toole

Book - Learning : The dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impertinent ignorance. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic. ~ C.S. Lewis

A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss. ~ John Kennedy Toole

I like characters like Ignatius Reilly in 'A Confederacy of Dunces' and Ricky Gervais's character in 'The Office.' They think one thing about themselves, but the truth is as far from that as it can be. So I began to think about how to put that kind of character in a book for kids. ~ Stephan Pastis

the vague feeling of ambitions in common, the awakening of a higher intelligence among the vulgar herd of dunces and dunderheads they had to contend with in class (27) ~ Emile Zola

Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces. ~ Jill Ciment

Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read "Lolita," or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term "square" already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than conservative youth, nor is there anything more philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St. Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet if he has not yet lined the coat of his fortunate shepherd. ~ Vladimir Nabokov