Stupid Quotes: Quotes that are the opposite of    Wisdom Quotes

We’ve heard a lot about the judgment of God and what we can’t do and what’s going to keep us out of heaven. But it’s time people start hearing about the goodness of God, about a God that loves them. A God that believes in them. A God that wants to help them. That’s our message here at Lakewood. --Joel Osteen (a God that believes in them?)

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil.  And that no one knows the truth. --Molly Ivins (in that case Molly should quit writing articles and books)

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.  --Alfred North Whitehead

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.  --Andre Gide ("Ye shall know the truth...")

Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. --Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (this is the guy who fabricated photos of fairies)

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.  --Clarence Darrow

History is bunk.  --Henry Ford

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.  --Friedrich Nietzsche

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem (not if you love it, Gloria.)

Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season. --Herakleitos

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth. --Pierre (Peter) Abelard

Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.  --Ralph Waldo Emerson (Conservatism is not the opposite of reform: to the contrary. )

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.  --Thomas Jefferson (but, he should have added, only by fools)

The true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.  --William James (the truth is not only or merely anything; the truth is the truth)

I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace.   --Helen Keller (who became a follower of Immanuel Swedenborg)

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people. --Mark Twain (This would make one a good Stoic, but not a virtuous person)

It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it.  --Sam Levenson (Since this is obviously a joke, it probably should not be included here)

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.  --Friedrich Nietzsche (say what?)

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. --Pablo Picasso

Life is "trying things to see if they work."  --Ray Bradbury ("Experience is the schoolhouse of fools")

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly; devils fall because of their gravity.  --G. K. Chesterton (As much as I love GKC, some of his paradoxes just don't work; he tries too hard, it seems to me. In another place on this site I say this of Chesterton: "He exaggerates too much. He would tell a dozen little lies to defend one great truth." I've learned more good sense from Chesterton than from almost any writer: this one falls short.)

If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? --Carl Sagan (yeah! to a pagan)

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth. -- Albert Camus (with this absurdity Camus has made a good start, then)

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth. -- Maya Angelou (so says that great American philosopher)

Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the order Primates, akin nearly and remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material. --George Gaylord Simpson (anyone who could believe this could believe anything, maybe even evolution)

That man is the product of causes which had no pre-vision of the end they were achieving: that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms: that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave: that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins---all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  --Bertrand Russell

Bastiat wrote, “Look at the law, and see whether it does for one citizen at the expense of another what it would be a crime for the first to do to the other himself." If so, the law itself is criminal.  --Joseph Sobran (This would make taxation and the death penalty criminal, for one citizen cannot legally take money from another or exercise justice upon another. Yet taxation and capital punishment are legitimate functions of government. Libertarians like Sobran place personal liberty above all other goods)

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. -- Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson was no doubt fortunate in his neighbors, all of whom were probably Christians; but no society or nation will long remain moral without Divine sanctions)

As a matter of fact, you have deficiencies in all religions, but you have truth in all religions. --Hans Kung (while it is true that there are truths in all religions, there are no deficiencies in the "faith once-for-all delivered unto the saints")

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved. --Hans Kung (spouting newage claptrap)

Politics are not the task of a Christian. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer (politics involve the collective effort of men; Christians are men).

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation. --John Calvin

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. -- Thomas Jefferson

The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.  -- Abraham Lincoln (All posthumous attempts to get Lincoln into heaven may, indeed, fail in the end.  Religion without dogma is mere sentiment)

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern. -- William Blake  ("For what is seen is temporal; what is unseen is eternal.")

Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.  --Karl Barth

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.  --Maria Montessori  (There will be no lasting peace on earth until Christ returns)

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.  --Ibid.

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children. --Ibid

It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago. --Ibid

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people. --Ibid.

I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix. --Ibid

For NASA, space is still a high priority. --Ibid.

I Am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + fundamentalist/calvinist + anabaptist/anglicans + methodist  + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished  Christian. --Brian McLaren

I don't think anything has been done in the name of Christ and under the banner of Christianity that has proven more destructive to human personality and, hence counterproductive to the evangelism enterprise, than the often crude, uncouth and un-Christian strategy of attempting to make people aware of their lost and sinful condition.  --Robert Schuller (A VERY stupid quote indeed!)

It is my deep conviction that anybody can be won to Christ if you discover the key to his or her heart. . . . It may take some time to identify it. But the most likely place to start is with the person’s felt needs. --Rick Warren (sinners seldom have a 'felt need' to be convinced of their sins)

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.  --Marshall McLuhan

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. --Thomas Babington Macaulay

The cynics are right nine times out of ten. --H L Mencken

The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit, it is also opposed to all attempts at rational thinking.  --H L Mencken

War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it.  --Benito Mussolini

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.  --R D Laing

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. --Emily Dickinson (maybe not a stupid, but certainly an atypical reaction to poetry)

Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.  --Rosie O’Donnell