arts and culture on Stupidity

Stupidity and ignorance, even if chosen in response to warnings against pride of intellect, do not guarantee love or spirituality.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a p...

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

Lord of families, tribes, peoples, nations and all the world: it’s for freedom You’ve set us free from sin, guilt, and judgment; free to do what is right and just, what is compassionate, gracious and ...

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Ignorance is the mother not of devotion but of heresy.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

But disdain – even mere lack – of intelligence, of thought, of knowledge, proves itself to be capable of as great a pride, and of as great a lovelessness or hatred, as does the greatest scholarship or...

The incessant witless repetition of advertisers' moron-fodder has become so much a part of life that, if we are not careful, we forget to be insulted by it.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nur...

He who provides for this life but takes not care for eternity is wise for a moment but a fool forever.

In our culture slow is a pejorative. When somebody has a low IQ, we dub him or her slow. When the service at a restaurant is lousy, we call it slow. When a movie is boring, again, we complain that it’...

Intellectual slothfulness is but a quack remedy for unbelief; the true remedy is consecration of intellectual powers to the service of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of dis...

Riches are the pettiest and least worthy gifts which God can give a man. What are they to God's Word, to bodily gifts, such as beauty and health; or to the gifts of the mind, such as understanding...

A strange species we are, we can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable,...

It is, after all, not intellect that is a threat to spirituality, but pride of intellect, a reliance on, a trust in, a worship of intellect.

Sloth is not to be confused with laziness. A slothful man may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly...

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the no...

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson points out our blind-spots with respect to pride: We rarely think of ourselves as proud. I...

In this post-truth world, any marketing BS seems tolerable.

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Unfortunately, the world has taken some of the greatest minds God has given us and locked them up in cages. Most very brilliant or creative people seem strange to ordinary people. Geniuses are almost ...