Harvey Pekar Quotes

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are-- and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.

I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.

When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.

In other words, the more stupid one is, the more he thinks he knows.

I was stupid when I was 17 or 18. My thought process was that I thought that I was legitimately a hyper-genius, and so I wanted to go to the hardest academic school I could to see if I was really as smart as I thought I was.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

I don't think I'm extremely intelligent by any means.

Most fools think they are only ignorant.

I don't really think of myself as stupid - but then, who does?

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it.

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

It is a great error to take oneself for more than one is, or for less than one is worth.

I can always tell how stupid someone is by how certain they are about what they're saying.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.

Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason: truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.

People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.

How easy it is to think well of ourselves. Until the moment is upon us, we can never be certain.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

In the same degree that we overrate ourselves, we shall underrate others.