Until there is time to sort things…. I’ll just toss in my favorite quotes on stupid. Let me know if I have missed an attribution:

“Willful ignorance is like stabbing truth in the back, or maybe even shooting it in the heart.”

Isaac Asimov:   “There is a cult of ignorance . . . 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.’”

“When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View?”  by Mardy Grothe

If your experience is anything like mine, I’m sure you can recall from your younger years when you first witnessed some local ignoramus offering a completely erroneous belief or a totally fallacious theory as the absolute truth. We called such people “crackpots” back then, and as I grew older, I learned that almost every neighborhood or community had one. All crackpots have one thing in common: there is simply no reasoning with them. A 1910 issue of Life magazine captured a truth about them when it cited an unknown author as saying:

“Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.”

There are lots and lots of people who can be described this way and, to make matters worse, many of them have infected countless others with their noxious ideas. Just think of the millions of holocaust deniers around the world. Or the millions of U. S. citizens who believed that a duly elected American president was born in a foreign country and therefore ineligible to occupy the nation’s highest office. Ignorance has been historically regarded as simply an absence of knowledge, but this new kind of ignorance—a willful ignorance—is like a metastasis of the original condition. Thanks to the philosopher Karl Popper, it might be viewed this way:

“Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.”

The problem of a conscious, purposeful, and heavily-defended ignorance got to such a ridiculous point as the 20th century came to a close that the cartoonist and social satirist Scott Adams gave an intriguing title to a 2001 book of his Dilbert cartoons: When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View? This week, reflect on how the phenomenon has shown up in your life, and how you responded when it did. Below you will find ten quotations to assist you in your reflections:

“To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.”

—A. BRONSON ALCOTT

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.”

—SAUL BELLOW

“The truest characters of ignorance

Are vanity, and pride, and arrogance.”

— SAMUEL BUTLER (1613–80)

“The highest form of ignorance is to reject something you know nothing about.”

—WAYNE W. DYER

“It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance, Knowledge slowly builds up

what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

—GEORGE ELIOT

“Stupidity’s the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.”

—WILLIAM GADDIS

“Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.”

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

“Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal. And he may properly be charged with evil, who refused to learn how he might prevent it.”

—SAMUEL JOHNSON

“Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”

—THOMAS PAINE

“There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.”

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Nanjiani says: Comedy is “a person dealing with a situation that they’re ill-equipped to handle.”

J.R.R. Tolkien. “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” 

I used to think I was indecisive, now I’m not sure. 

No matter how big a hammer you use, you can’t pound common sense into stupid people

My two favorite comments are. God must love stupid people other wise he wouldn’t made so many. And we try to idiot proof things here, but keep hiring better idiots.

Why am I the only naked person here at the gender reveal party.

Trump is living proof that a con man doesn’t have to be smart if his victims are stupid enough.

Ricky Gervais

Same sex marriage isn’t gay privilege, it’s equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don’t.

Stupids web site def

‘A serious collection of articles, links, and lists about the frustrations experienced when stupid people are successful at foisting their idiocy on the rest of humankind.’;

public $MetaKeys = ‘Stupid, serious articles, people, products, TSAW, 

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“The more ignorant we become the less value we set on science, and the less inclination we shall have to seek it.”
― Thomas Jefferson