Dumbing Quotes & Sayings

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago. — Steven Johnson

Stop worrying about the 'dumbing down' of our language by bloggers, tweeters, cableheads and MSM thumbsuckers engaged in a 'race to the bottom' of the page by little minds confined to little words. — William Safire

There's clearly a war against freedom of conscience happening, and the most resistant fighters are the chosen victims, in a deliberate, persistent and consistent dumbing down of the population. — Daniel Marques

True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down. — Isaac Asimov

In pursuit of happiness, smart people often end up dumbing down themselves. — Erol Ozan

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free. — Sarah Schulman

I discovered that I, a writer of what is known as creative nonfiction, could do the research and bridge the gap in my books and lectures through true storytelling. This is not 'dumbing down' or writing for eighth graders. It is writing for readers across cultures, age barriers, social and political landscapes. — Lee Gutkind

The ability to convince people of the wackiest notions - and both parties can do it - it's part of the dumbing down of America that's really highly problematic. — Gary Ackerman

If we are going to compete in this world we're in today, there is no possible way we can do it with lowering expectations and dumbing down everything. Children are going to suffer, and families' hearts are going to be broken that their kids won't be able to get a job in the 21st Century. — Jeb Bush

I don't like to say I'm happy. The Universe always finds out and corrects its mistake. — David Willis

Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you. — Denis Dutton

Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started 'Wine Library TV.' They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now. — Gary Vaynerchuk

I've done a lot of surveys and interacted with a lot of students, and I was shocked to see that at 12 years old, girls are already talking about dumbing themselves down. — Danica McKellar

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance. — Carl Sagan

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. — Carl Sagan

And I can see that everything about this God has been purposely designed to poison our experience of life on earth, not to enhance it, to keep us fearful, to suppress knowledge, to curtail freedom and creativity, and to celebrate death. It's nothing less than the sanctified dumbing-down of the human race. And demanding respect for it is frankly an insult that deserves to be repaid with considerable interest. — Pat Condell

There is absolutely no point in not being a populist. What I feel emboldened to do is to take something which is a minority interest and make it accessible without dumbing it down. I'm such an enthusiast for peculiar things, things that are perhaps a bit avant-garde, and try and involve everyone. — Lee Hall

I had been struggling with how to create a child-like protagonist's voice without making it sound as though I was 'dumbing down' to the character. They are able to see events, people and places with an intensity and open mindedness that adults lack. — An Na

[Charlie] Moon was trying hard to get a handle on this. Maybe he's got a PhD. What with pass-fail replacing conventional grading, Internet diploma mills, and who knows what other academic innovations that has been driving the dumbing-down in American education, you couldn't tell who might have a sheepskin tucked away in his hip pocket. — James D. Doss

The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them. — Stephen Sondheim

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much ... Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing. — Diane Ackerman

There have been vast changes in the composition and role of the news media over the decades, and that is a cause for concern as well. When I first entered government nearly forty-eight years ago, three television networks and a handful of newspapers dominated coverage and, to a considerable degree, filtered the most extreme or vitriolic points of view. Today, with hundreds of cable channels, blogs, and other electronic media, too often the professional integrity and long-established standards and practices of journalists are diluted or ignored. Every point of view - including the most extreme - has a ready vehicle for rapid dissemination. And it seems the more vitriolic the opinion, the more attention it gets. This system is clearly more democratic and open, but I believe it has also fueled the coarsening and dumbing down of our national political dialogue. — Robert M. Gates

No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so ... [Y]ou cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge. — Mark Lilla

Amber wanted to see special operations open to women and she believed they all should have a shot at going to Ranger School but only if there were no shortcuts, no dumbing down of any of the requirements, the same standards for everyone. And everyone would have the chance to meet them. T — Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

There is an epidemic right now of girls dumbing themselves down ... in middle school because they think it makes them attractive. — Danica McKellar

The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience. — Natasha Pulley

John Taylor Gatto's extraordinary book, Dumbing Us Down. Check out Mary Griffith's The Unschooling Handbook and Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Take a look at Home Education Magazine and its website. — Daniel H. Pink

I'm generally pessimistic about the dumbing down of America - especially with summer movies. — Elmer Bernstein

I'm just gonna do my own kinda swag of kinda dumbing something down and speaking some knowledge. — SonReal

This is the twenty-first century. The oceans are rising. Mad dictators have access to nuclear weapons. Corporatism and the dumbing down of the media have destroyed the very foundations of democracy. Anyone who isn't afraid is a moron." There — Tommy Wallach

Advocates of dumbing down should note the wonderfully perverse fact that 'University Challenge' and 'Mastermind' were watched by millions who could hardly even understand the questions, let alone ejaculate the answers. Maybe they just liked to watch smart people sweating. — Declan Lynch

I'm not sure why I enjoy debunking. Part of it surely is amusement over the follies of true believers, and [it is] partly because attacking bogus science is a painless way to learn good science. You have to know something about relativity theory, for example, to know where opponents of Einstein go wrong ... Another reason for debunking is that bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society. — Martin Gardner

Everybody is in your business, gossiping and being mean spirited. It's different. Sometimes I'm like, "Do I want to do this?," because it's not about the art anymore. It's a struggle. There's part of me that wants to share my gift, which is art, and if I don't, am I taking away something that the Creator gave me to share? At the same time, I don't want to be a part of feeding the dumbing down of society. — Tinsel Korey

I love a good harsh horror movie, when it's done well. But there are times when it feels cynical. You can tell when a filmmaker loves the genre, and you can tell when someone's just cashing in a paycheck. Then it becomes a dumbing down - a fetishisation of violence that I react very strongly against. — Drew Goddard

I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right. — Richard Dawkins

In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down. — David Chipperfield

I hate to say it, but there seems to have been some sort of dumbing down as far as movies go. — Sam Neill

The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world's Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying 'guest fees' to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media - and not just The Washington Post - is where democracies conduct their civil wars. — David Mitchell

I couldn't believe that last publisher. If you keep dumbing down art/products, the culture/consumers will remain dumb, maybe even regress. We'd have a country filled with idiots. Why not push people to be smarter? Is being smart a bad thing? Maybe we are in a dark age of some sort. Stupidity isn't only being encouraged, it's being cultivated. It's easier to make money and control people when they are dumber than you. After — D.B. Rouse

Why is this interesting? Why are we watching? — Kate Tempest

At the core of what I'm doing is a belief in the audience, a belief that populism doesn't mean dumbing down theater, but rather giving the audience a voice and a role in experiencing theater. — Diane Paulus

Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street, the battlers, by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them, they are treating them with contempt. It's our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them. — Malcolm Turnbull

You go in and meet the head of BBC One and get an assurance about not dumbing down. And then, of course a few months later, he's been replaced by someone you haven't met. — John Cleese