The triumph of stupidity an article by Bertrand Russell, who wants to point out the fundamental cause of our troubles, namely that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
You can beat 40 scholars with one fact, but you can beat one idiot with 40 facts.
Rumi
Being a scholar of stupidity, how might I avoid to thank a lot of people for their existence.
Carl William Brown
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.
Mark Twain
The history of great world leaders is often the history of human folly.
Voltaire
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Youth grows old, immaturity fades away, ignorance can become education and drunkenness can become sobriety, but stupidity lasts forever.
Aristophanes
Tragedy, arising from the deep source of compassion, is in its essence pessimistic. In it, existence is something supremely terrible, man is something supremely foolish.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.
Arthur Shopenhauer
Unfortunately our planet is more and more full of increasingly empty men, to paraphrase Eliot, shapeless figures, colorless shadows, not souls, lost and violent, but only, empty men, stuffed men, created by the taxidermists of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
Voltaire
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in a large group.
George Carlin
Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.
Anonymous
By now humanity has become so imbecile that we often tend to mortify intelligence, in order not to offend stupidity.
Carl William Brown
The most intelligent recedes. The world domination of stupidity is based on this sad truth.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
Paul Gauguin
So you see, the universe is made up by protons, electrons, neutrons and morons.
Anonymous
Man is the most intelligent of the animals, and the most silly.
Diogenes
You can’t overestimate the stupidity of the general public.
Charles Bukowski
A clever person solves problems. A wise person avoids them. On the contrary a stupid man creates them. And if the world is full of problems, there must be a clear reason!
Albert Einstein
Why look for conspiracy when stupidity can explain so much.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man profits more by the sight of an idiot than by the orations of the learned.
Arabian Proverb
Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed!
Albert Einstein
What has been happening in Germany is a matter of the gravest portent for the whole civilized world. Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, individual Germans have done more to further civilization than the individuals of any other country; during the latter half of this period, Germans, collectively, have been equally effective in degrading civilization.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell
At the present day the most distinguished names in the world of learning are still German; the most degraded and brutal government is also German. Of the individual Germans whose work has caused Germany to be respected, some are in exile, some in hiding, and some have disappeared, their fate unknown. Given a few years of Nazi rule, Germany will sink to the level of a horde of Goths.
What has happened? What has happened is quite simple. Those elements of the population which are both brutal and stupid (and these two qualities usually go together) have combined against the rest. By murder, by torture, by imprisonment, by the terrorism of armed forces, they have subjected the intelligent and humane parts of the nation and seized power with the view of furthering the glory of the Fatherland.
What has happened in Germany may well happen elsewhere. The British Fascists are not as yet a large party, but they are growing rapidly, and if at any future time there should be danger of a Labour Government that meant business, they would win the support of most of the governing classes. Meanwhile, the British government of India is a form of Fascism, all the worse for being alien. The British in India, like the Hitlerites in Germany, can only govern by putting the best people in prison.
Brute force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization. The danger is profound and terrible; it cannot be waved aside with easy optimism.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
This was not always the case. A hundred years ago the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent men who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are; the result was that they dominated politics and that the world advanced rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being.
It is quite true that the intelligence of the philosophical radicals was very limited. It is, I think, undeniable that the best men of the present day have a wider and truer outlook, but the best men of that day had influence, while the best men of this are impotent spectators. Perhaps we shall have to realise that scepticism and intellectual individualism are luxuries which in our tragic age must be forgone, and if intelligence is to be effective, it will have to be combined with a moral fervour which it usually possessed in the past but now usually lacks.
In this gloomy state of affairs, the brightest spot is America. In America democracy still appears well established, and the men in power deal with what is amiss by constructive measures, not by pogroms and wholesale imprisonment. After the defeat of the French Revolution, democracy; discredited by the reign of terror, reconquered the world from America. Perhaps America is destined once more to save Europe from the consequences of its excesses. (10 May 1933)
Bertrand Russell (In: Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell’s American Essays, 1931-1935, p.28.)
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On the same topic you can also read:
Quotes against power and stupidity 1
Quotes against power and stupidity 2
