What does the vision offer that reality does not offer? What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin. For those who have this vision of the world, the anointed and the benighted do not argue on the same moral plane or play by the same cold rules of logic and evidence.
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
Again, (America is) a stupid country with stupid people who don't pay attention.
Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.
People nowadays talk about issues as if they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they read and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.
'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
... we need to interrogate "reverence," for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.
The stupidity of one brain multiplied by twelve.
People who've been through our educational system, they think they're thinking, when they're just repeating like parrots.
Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: 'Oh, that's just the way things are done around here.' Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.
No subject over the past 30 years has lent itself so readily to politicians memorizing and repeating combinations of words without the slightest idea of what they are talking about.
Jenkins is referring to climate change.
Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
[W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused.
I agree some people are biased, and I agree that they exist in a world of pure, sheer, raw hatred for anything they don't agree with, but I do believe they're also ignorant. I think they're dumb as skunks. I don't think they've been educated. They haven't the ability to hear and listen to common sense and understand what it is.
The New York Times is filled with Ivy League graduates and so is the Washington Post. I mean, it's all the same club. They may be Ivy League educated, but they're not smart. Their minds are closed. They actually are mind-numbed robots. They have been programmed all their lives. They're not even thinkers. These are people who have been programmed to believe what they believe. They are committed believers, not thinkers.
I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.
...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
You should be more afraid of a stupid man than of an evil one.
Rules are invented for lazy people who don't want to think for themselves.
The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.
... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.
For men to be tied and led by authority, as it were with a kind of captivity of judgment, and though there be reason to the contrary not to listen unto it, but to follow like beasts the first in the herd, they know not, nor care not whither, this were brutish.
