Ignoble Idiocy Quotes

Of course, ignoble idiocy seems to be an epidemic around these parts." Cheshire began to fade away. "So he shall not be alone. ~ Marissa Meyer

Except for my net, everything I have need of in the world is contained in that bag - including a second hat and a rather sizable jar of cold cream of roses. Do not tell me you couldn't travel with as little. I have faith that men can be as reasonable and logical as women if they but try." He shook his head. "I cannot seem to formulate a clear thought in the face of such original thinking, Miss Speedwell. You have a high opinion of your sex." I pursed my lips. "Not all of it. We are, as a gender, undereducated and infantilized to the point of idiocy. But those of us who have been given the benefit of learning and useful occupation, well, we are proof that the traditional notions of feminine delicacy and helplessness are the purest poppycock."

"You have large opinions for so small a person."

"I daresay they would be large opinions even for someone your size," I countered.

"And where did you form these opinions? Either your school was inordinately progressive or your governess was a Radical."

"I never went to school, nor did I have a governess. Books were my tutors, Mr. Stoker. Anything I wished to learn I taught myself."

"There are limits to an autodidactic education," he pointed out.

"Few that I have found. I was spared the prejudices of formal educators."

"And neither were you inspired by them. A good teacher can change the course of a life," he said thoughtfully.

"Perhaps. But I had ~ Deanna Raybourn

And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us. ~ Samuel R. Delany

It's tragic to think that heroic man's great destiny is to become economic man, that men will be reduced to craven creatures who crawl across the globe competing for money, who spend their nights dreaming up new ways to swindle each other. That's the path we're on now. What a withering, ignoble end ... ~ Jack Donovan

The door to the courtroom burst open and Lancelot swept in. Dressed in a full suit of armour, the idiot looked like an idiot. His idiot blond hair and idiot chiseled jaw line further contributed to his idiocy. The idiot cleft on his too pretty face and the idiot swagger to his too swaggering proclaimed to anyone that he was the biggest idiot in the kingdom. And, given that the Northlands was full to bursting with idiots, that was quite a feat of idiocy. ~ Cassandra Gannon

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I understand that it's disheartening to pour effort and money into a work of art and find that others do not value it with the same intensity. I've been to this rodeo more than a few times, and yes, it's painful and hard on the soul. It is also the sort of thing that grown-ups do every day. Anyone deluded enough to think they are owed monetary success because they bled for their art is in for some hard, hard knocks and buckets full of tears. There will be many cries of "unfair" and much jealousy and hatred. And to be fair, all authors go through this every time they watch their books ride the waves of bestseller charts and the ego torture chamber known as Goodreads reviews. Even the most well-adjusted of us watch that horrible piece of shit book beat our baby to pieces and gnash our teeth and shout at our monitors demanding to know what brain-donors are shopping on amazon.com these days.

But holy Smart Bitch on a cracker, Batman, to write a post about how stupid readers are and worse to actually put it out there on the internet is so beyond the pale there's a special hell for that kind of idiocy. Let me repeat: authors exist at the pleasure of readers. Without the people who buy and read my books, I am just another dizzy broad writing shit down. Readers aren't just an author's audience; they are her lifeblood.
-- ~ Heidi Cullinan

A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution. ~ Lord Chesterfield

There is no sincere stupidity that doesn't create, eventually, its own rationale, conduct, operating procedures, its own critical formulae whereby it may be, in all seriousness, discussed: witness the advertising business. Witness the best-seller list. Areas of idiocy within which various degrees of the spurious are compared. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

Not knowing is ok. Not wanting to know is idiocy. ~ Mehnaz Ansari

Bravery is absence of contemplation and idiocy is the extinction of it. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

The dried blood from the wounds leaves dark and repulsive stains on the ground. Cleaning them up, I think of the identical nature of men: the same red blood irrigating the same organs. These organs, situated in the same places, carry out the same functions. The same remedies cure the same illnesses everywhere under the sun, whether the individual be white or black. Everything united men. Why, then, do they kill each other in ignoble wars for causes that are futile when compared with the massacre of human lives? So many devastating wars! And yet man takes himself to be a superior being. In what way is his intelligence useful to him? His intelligence begets both good and ill, more often ill than good. ~ Mariama Ba

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. ~ William Manchester

The truth about idiocy ... is that it is at once an ethical and cognitive failure ... The Greek idios means 'private,' and idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role ... This still comes across in the related English words 'idiomatic' and 'idiosyncratic,' which similarly suggest self-enclosure ... At the bottom, the idiot is a solipsist. ~ Matthew B. Crawford

If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of tendency of magic to become supertition. Magic - and among its branches I include psychology as its purpose to describe and change consciousness - is an art. ~ Starhawk

No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind. ~ John T. Flynn

One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are "sex-negative" without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Two Extremes Scripture and experience warn us that here we have to steer our course between two opposite extremes of disaster. On the one hand, there is the legalistic hypocrisy of Pharisaism (God-serving outward actions proceeding from self-serving inward motives), and on the other hand there is the antinomian idiocy that rattles on about love and liberty, forgetting that the God-given law remains the standard of the God-honoring life. Both Pharisaism and antinomianism are ruinous. ~ J.I. Packer

All men had their limitations. It was just that some were more dangerous than others. And while genius knew it had limits, idiocy was always unbounded. ~ Tom Clancy

People who truly have control over time always have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. A sense of priorities drives their use of time and it can shift away from the ordinary work that's easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy; these people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or relax more often than the rest, but that just might be a sign of their mastery, not their incompetence. ~ Scott Berkun

They're us!They've repopulated the world, and now they've achieved the same state of idiocy they were in before, ready to blow themselves up all over again. Great, isn't it? That's the human race! ~ Rene Barjavel

I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these two goats [Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard]. ~ Aleister Crowley

Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in. ~ Virginia Woolf

Applaud my idiocy. ~ Conan O'Brien

Writers choose to drink because of their inability to cope with the daily hassles of being part of a society. Why shouldn't they? Every day an intelligent human being is plagued with bills, horrifying news stories and general idiocy that slowly grinds away at their psyche, breaking off pieces of it that may never fit again. ~ Thor Benson

Spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins. What else are they? One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators. And don't forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy. But ~ Jack London

So many writers had grown lyrical over spring. And, one must admit, it was easy to love a lamb: but how soon that engaging frivolity would yield to the placid idiocy of its inheritance; it was not easy to love a sheep. Summer? Yes, but it was overweighted, overcolored. No - for herself she preferred late autumn, when line returned, with wider, subtler blends of color and experience. ~ Heron Carvic

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember th ~ Neil Postman

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure. ~ H.L. Mencken

What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born. ~ Longinus

Confusion is not an ignoble condition ~ Brian Friel

And human love needs human meriting:
How has thou merited-
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me? ~ Francis G. Thompson

A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause
And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.
In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull,
Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things,
The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways
And feels the push but not the hands that drive.
For none can see the masked ironic troupe
To whom our figure-selves are marionettes,
Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp,
Our passionate strife an entertainment's scene. ~ Sri Aurobindo