Roland Barthes Quotes

Don't cater to stupidity.

People are not stupid.

A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty.

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

I know a lot of people think I'm dumb. Well, at least I ain't no educated fool.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I'm not stupid. I mean, I didn't go to college but I've got a lot of common sense.

If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe...they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect.

The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just bullshit.

Much learning does not teach sense.

Education does not necessarily make one wise?

It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.

There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity.

It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

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

If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know.

Granny sighed. "You have learned something," she said, and thought it safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. "There's no place for impractical dreamers around here," that's what they always say. "Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around." "As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers." Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

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.

Most people know nothing about learning; many despise it. Dummies reject as too hard whatever is not dumb.