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Imbecility Quotes

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Imbecility Quotes

“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.”

HumorTruthDeathEnergyExistenceSupportSacrificeAtheismMoralityArgumentLogicValueProofRidiculousDevotionWickedEnduranceMartyrSantaSanta ClausAssumptionsPragmatismFalseImbecilitySophistryTheologiansLogicians
Book:Minority Report
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“In 1546 a band of weevils were tried for damaging church vineyards in St Julien. Such trials were rife in the sixteenth century, and the distinguished French lawyer Bartholomew Chassenée rose to fame as an advocate for animals. His work is commemorated in Julian Barnes's mischievous short story 'The Wars of Religion', in which excommunication is sought for a colony of woodworm which had gnawed away the supporting legs of the Bishop of Besançon's throne, causing him to be 'hurled against his will into a state of imbecility'.”

HistoryImbecilityWeevils
Book:Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature
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“Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.”

IfsKnowsCertainKnow HowPainterStaringInsecurityBlankCanvasImbecilityBlank CanvasStaring At You
Book:The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother, 1872-1886: With a Memoir by His Sister-in-law, J. Van Gogh-Bonger ...
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“Nothing betrays imbecility so much as the being insensible of it.”

BetrayInsensibleImbecility
Book:The writings of Thomas Jefferson: being his autobiography, correspondence, reports, messages, addresses, and other writings, official and private : published by the order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the original manuscripts, deposited in the Department of State
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“To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes.”

MenDreamPastCertainSexJusticePrinciplesCenturyDangerousIntegrityEternalWeaknessBuiltFemaleMalesFeministSexualityDependencePsychicsFemininityProjectionMasochismImbecilityDependabilityUnreliability
Author:Elizabeth Gould Davis
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“One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”

HumansImportantFeelingsNightCertainValuesKnowledgeHeardIgnoranceFlowerUnderstoodGardenDirectStrikesMoodDramaticPoeticLeafsMeadowsProdigiesImbecilityDazed
Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“The youth who follows his appetites too soon seizes the cup, before it has received its best ingredients, and by anticipating his pleasures, robs the remaining parts of life of their share, so that his eagerness only produces manhood of imbecility and an age of pain.”

AgePainPleasureShareYouthProduceCupsIngredientsAppetiteManhoodParts Of LifeEagernessImbecility
Book:A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature
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“If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.”

IfsGivingFallIndividualToo MuchSolitudeResourcesRelationStrangerIsolationDistractionFountainImbecility
Book:Woman in the Nineteenth Century
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“Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.”

MenArtInspirationUnderstandingArt IsWeakMereGuidanceArtificeImbecility
Book:Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers. Third edition. First Series
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“Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it. It is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are country neighborhoods in which it rages like a pest. Churches are split in pieces by it. Neighbors are made enemies by it for life. In many persons it degenerates into a chronic disease, which is practically incurable. Let the young cure it while they may.”

ShouldMayPersonsMadeCountryYoungCultureChurchEnemyPiecesDiseaseLowsRageNeighborCuresTemptationDirtyNeighborhoodGossipConfessionSplitsIndulgeMaliceThoroughIndulge InDegeneratesFrivolousPestsImbecilityDirty Business
Author:J. G. Holland
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“You must elect your work; you shall take what your brains can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. It is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.”

MenMatterForceBrainStepsKnowingTakenSeeingAmountMethodCirclesFacultyIdleChalkFruitfulnessImbecility
Book:The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations
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“Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.”

MenFeelsPainFallGrowsSorrowReflectionMiseryDeeperReliefDeclineAdequatePietyPlungeIncessantlyImbecilityPain And Sorrow
Book:The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D..: The Rambler
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“But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.”

MayDoeSeemsLastsArtistHonestMinesUnderstoodGreedInvestingPainfulPainterBitterVanityBeing HonestMeritMy TimeConfessionClownImbecilityGoyaGiotto
Author:Pablo Picasso
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“For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity's most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one's fellowmen to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve.”

IfsMenFeelsWarReasonWould BeHumanityFightingNationsWealthHorrorAskingProfoundEndureSakeAcceptedShyJustificationInvitationsAdmittingImbecilityHorror Of War
Book:The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews
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“Even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights: the right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities, provided only that he does not try to inflict them upon others by force; he has the right to argue for them as eloquently as he can. But he has no right to be protected from the criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.”

MenTryingDoeCertainForceChallengesRightsDemandCriticismSacredArguingTreatedProtectedIndulgeHarborsSuperstitiousInalienable RightsImbecility
Author:H. L. Mencken
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“That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.”

ShouldHumansStillsRaceLordStageMastersFineLatePrejudiceProofArguingObservationHuman RaceEloquentDefectiveFluentImbecilitySenility
Book:In Defense of Women: Human Sexuality
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“To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true. (Mr Rochester to Jane)”

HeartDoeMadeSoulCharacterEyeFacesBreakClearFirePerspectivePleaseDevilIllTongueConsistentTemperStableJaneEloquentTrivialityPlease MeSuppleImbecilityRochesterClear EyesMr RochesterFlatness
Book:The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
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“Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.”

PeopleKnowsWorldHumansI CanStatesDiesThreeResultsKnow HowFourGenerationsTelevisionReturnLaughterJokesErasBombsOur WorldMedievalFartAntichristBanalitySavagerySlugsImbecilityFour Generations
Author:Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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“you've got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you've got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you've got to starve like a winter alleycat, you've go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment.”

KnowsMomentsMightRunningCitiesMadnessDown AndWinterEdgesTinyGutsWhere You AreDozenBullyUp And DownDemonicStraight UpImbecility
Author:Charles Bukowski
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“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.”

IfsMenWayChildrenFactsWould BePoliticalExistenceProveValuableDefenseProofArguingLogicalEnduranceExtensionsSantaSanta ClausPragmatismImbecility
Book:Minority Report
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“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

IfsWorldKindEnoughThreeWaitingPrinciplesCuttingGenerationsCrimeBroadsContinuingTubesOffspringEugenicsDegeneratesCompulsoryImbecilesVaccinationsImbecilityThree GenerationsSterilization
Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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“To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life.”

KnowsMenNeedsKindImportantPainDiesPassionFearParentBornStepsTroubleAtheismIgnoranceReturnCrisisErrorsStupidityRageAll KindsSicknessMidstOne ManWhere You AreWickednessPulseKnavesCharlatansWhere You ComeWhere You Are GoingImbecilityNature Life
Author:Denis Diderot
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