Catherine Drinker Bowen Quotes

The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.

How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand!

It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.

Advisers who think that they are very clever while all around them are a bit thick, and that all the problems of the world would be solved if the thick listened to the clever, are liable to be disappointed.

You're just poor cornball provincial people, you critics; you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

There will always be those people who are just backward and ignorant. There will always be those people. They need somebody to feel superior to.

Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.

The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.

Like power in any shape, a full stomach always holds a dose of insolence, and this expresses itself first of all in the well-fed lecturing the starving.

… when we know a thing we have only scorn for other people who don’t happen to know it.

You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

It is with nations as with individuals, those who know the least of others think the highest of themselves; for the whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other.

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.

Reasons are for peasants.

We cannot tell some people what it is believe, partly because they are too stupid to understand, partly because we are too proudly vague to explain.

Second-rate minds usually condemn everything beyond their grasp.

Thinking you know something is a sure way to blind yourself.

There is no folly like the folly of the wise.

Many men would have arrived at wisdom had they not believed themselves to have arrived there already.

The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn-the less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything.

Only the very ignorant are perfectly satisfied that they know. To the common man the great problems are easy. He has no trouble in accounting for the universe. He can tell you the origin and destiny of man and the why and wherefore of things.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

You can do anything when you're famous. That's why famous people are so dumb.