Robertson Davies Quotes

The enemy isn’t men, or women, it’s bloody stupid people and no-one has the right to be stupid.

Anybody who French bashes just might as well wear a badge that says 'I am a follower! I don't think for myself and I have no idea what I'm talking about.' That would be a French basher.

Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

Fools who won't see the truth are deadly.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.

Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or...of something else.

Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.

O that men's ears should be To counsel deaf but not to flattery!

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

The blind won't admit that I have eyes in my head, and the deaf say that I'm dumb.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

Admiration is the basis of ignorance.

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

Men are so stupid and concerned with their present needs, they will always let themselves be deceived.

There are four chief obstacles in grasping truth ... namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and the concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.

Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be attributed to ignorance.

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.

Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.