This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Once again, modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And, once again, the appropriate response is twofold. First, many many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not as literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory? Then an allegory for what? Surely morals could one derive from this appalling story? Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.
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.
It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion...
If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we must stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.
Angels | Common Sense | Greed | Happy | Justice | Land | Little | Lust | Risk | Sense | Stupidity | Virtue | Virtue |
It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity
Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste on the other, by which, on the same income, another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.
Stupidity | Tenderness |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.
Courage | Danger | Means | Stupidity | Danger | Think | Understand |
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
Let us never forget this: since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.
We talk about the ‘march from monad to man’ (old-style language again) as though evolution followed continuous pathways to progress along unbroken lineages. Nothing could be further from reality. I do not deny that, through time, the most ‘advanced’ organism has tended to increase in complexity. But the sequence [allocated in most texts] from jellyfish to trilobite to nautiloid to armored fish to dinosaur to monkey to human is no lineage at all, but a chronological set of termini on unrelated evolutionary trunks. Moreover life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense — only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Absence | Asceticism | Control | Fear | People | Position | Power | Question | Rancor | Research | Responsibility | Shame | Speculation | Stupidity | Thinking | Thought | Asceticism | Thought |
The lessons we learn in sadness and from loss are those that abide. - Sorrow clarifies the mind, steadies it, forces it to weigh things correctly. - The soil moist with tears best feeds the seeds of truth.
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest.
And yet without labor there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
Consecration | Folly | Rule | Stupidity |
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
Conscience | Man | Sound | Stupidity |