intellectual regression Quotes

The too perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.

If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

It's not getting any better for the American people. It seems to be getting worse. That's predictable; education is a cycle. Stupidity breeds more stupidity.

Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.

Not material or economic conditions in the ordinary sense, but perverse religious ideas explain the suspension of civilization in Europe from the 5th to the 12th century, and in the Mohammedan world after the 15th century.

The consequences of being an idiot aren’t suffered just by the idiots. Stupidity is a mass phenomenon: It builds on its own momentum, and that momentum can change empires.

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.