Bill Maher Quotes

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

We have had people for so many generations dumbed down, literally dumbed down, who are now in positions of awesome and extreme power with influence over others, that we're paralyzed. And, if we're not paralyzed, we are backtracking and moving backwards. We are actually regressing, I should say, from magnificent progress that we as a nation and a culture and society have taken over hundreds of years.

Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.

This nation has been drifting back in comparison with the rest of the world for the last 20 years in education.

Our educational results lag behind other states, and other nations, but worse still, behind the potential of the kids and the devoted teachers in our classrooms.

I never went to class. That the university graduated me at all is an indictment of our educational system.

I've never understood cheating, probably because I never cared much about my grades. I instinctively knew that the grades didn't measure anything meaningful - usually just my ability to quickly memorize information I'd just as quickly forget.

I feel like the world is getting dumber. I don't necessarily think people are stupid, but I think we're getting dumber.

The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless

People are always talking about the dumbing down of the country.

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.

The notion about education has changed and that now it’s sort of much more aligned with, “Well, schools can’t combat poverty. We can’t possibly expect schools to do the work to overcome poverty.” I think that notion which has changed over the last few decades is part, not all, but part of what is maybe leading to people feeling less of a sense of possibility.

I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider. And Also FOX News makes people stupider.

At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.

In the second half of the 20th century, people are becoming more limited: Vocabularies are smaller, thoughts are smaller, aspirations are smaller, everything is very scaled down. Everyone is typecast.

There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly-but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.

Somewhere between the ages of eleven and fifteen, the average child begins to suffer from an atrophy, the paralysis of curiosity and the suspension of the power to observe. The trouble, I should judge, to lie with the schools.

Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

The quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers.

Poor people always lose in struggles.

At Boston University, I motivated negatively, and I found that although it can work at first, by the end of the year everyone is dying for the year to end and you have lost them. The last two years at BU, I motivated positively and got much better results.

You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

I do know people and there are people in my family who have had Alzheimer's and dementia, and I appreciate the importance of communication and having contact with them. Communicating is an interesting thing with a condition like that. Sometimes it's difficult to communicate. If the brain becomes atrophied or certain channels of the brain become atrophied, then contact is what becomes really important.