Imbecile Quotes & Sayings

When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger. — Confucius

You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,
though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror? — Milan Kundera

Hercule Poirot: I am an imbecile. I see only half of the picture.
Miss Lemon: I don't even see that. — Agatha Christie

When God created man and woman, he did not take a patent. That's why any imbecile has been able to do so ever since. — George Bernard Shaw

Fuck, I think. Just that. A multitude of various fucks all in one great big clusterfuck. As in: I am fucked if I want this ... this ... newborn imbecile. And she is so fucked if I take her. And fuck if I'm going to walk away. — Karen Marie Moning

The true France is a multicultural France. Where someone is appointed minister not because she is a woman but because she is competent. And not because she is from a visible minority. I am against positive discrimination. Someone can be intelligent and black, and someone can be an imbecile and white. — Patrick Gaubert

There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war. — Kurt Vonnegut

As soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich man, I cannot help looking upon him as an exceptional and beautiful being, as a sort of marvellous divinity, and, in spite of myself, surmounting my will and my reason, I feel rising, from the depths of my being, toward this rich man, who is very often an imbecile, and sometimes a murderer, something like an incense of admiration. Is it not stupid? And why? Why? — Octave Mirbeau

I thought you were dead," Bera breathed.
Cadsuane sniffed irritably. "I am growing tired of hearing that. The next imbecile I hear it from is going to yelp for a week. — Robert Jordan

He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone. — Arthur Conan Doyle

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed. — Cormac McCarthy

Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made. Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak. — Ezra Pound

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people - even the Pope is writing on Twitter - we have a great quantity of idiots. — Umberto Eco

The ability to consume pornography is the distinctive characteristic of the imbecile. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

The golden apples drop from the same tree, whether they be gathered by an imbecile locksmith's apprentice or by a Schopenhauer. — C. G. Jung

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

She was not going to ruin a good dress for a pot of drooling, wall-staring, imbecile grass. And that was that. — Brandon Sanderson

To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events. — David Hume

The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles. — Robert Anton Wilson

IMBECILE!" the chef shouted. "Next time why don't you just put your whole HAND in the food, hey? Yes, your whole hand, or maybe your FACE! I arrange the food on plates with care, are you understanding what I am telling you? It is part of the art form of cooking, yes? A lovely plate of food is a thing of beauty! And then you, NUMBSKULL, come along and put your fat greasy FINGERS all over my plate, and SHAKE the plate, and move my food all around the plate until it looks like pigs' vomit!"
"Chef Vlad!" I cried out in delight. — Kenneth Oppel

It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject. For — George Bernard Shaw

What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. — Blaise Pascal

I'm technologically an imbecile. But I do use the camera phone! — Amanda Peet

I am definitely not scared of Mike Tyson. I am at the top of the food chain and he is looking to knock me off. Mike's an arrogant imbecile. He sounds like a cartoon character. — Lennox Lewis

The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile. — David Steinberg

Only a f-kin imbecile would think they un-correctable, cause you're susceptible to becoming more than a spectacle. — Immortal Technique

When I found I had given birth to a human wreckage, to a child that was an imbecile, my heart was broken. — Victoria Woodhull

Furo Costas. The Rager. You, my friend, are an imbecile. You could have killed me twenty times, on the Tracks. I'm surprised you're not dead.
Ro shrugs, happily. It's nothing he hasn't heard before, and nothing he doesn't see as a compliment. — Margaret Stohl

I had warned her that lawyers shouldn't marry other lawyers, that it only led to imbecile paralegals. — Craig Johnson

What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle? — Blaise Pascal

It is a poor, unwise and very imbecile people who cannot take care of themselves. — Brigham Young

An animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin
to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it. — Henry Miller

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself
he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice. — Kevin Brockmeier

The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbecile. Yet it was so. — Ford Madox Ford

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile. — Umberto Eco

What time was that email sent?" I asked, with my own cocky grin beginning to form across my face. Sara clicked around a few times and then said, "Two-oh-seven a.m." "Shit," Jack said quietyly while I laughed aloud. "I knew it! Your are so busted, Hamilton!" I cried. I was teasing him, but inwardly I was dancing like an imbecile. — Alice Clayton

The mother of the imbecile is always pregnant, — Vincenzo Nibali

It's the look you give a well-behaved imbecile, an insurance policy against cosmic malevolence. — Dominic Smith

In my life, I had known suffering, oppression, anxiety; I had never known boredom. I could see no objection to the endless, imbecile repetition of sameness. — Michel Houellebecq

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile. — George Bernard Shaw

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense. — Chris Kraus

It was stealing her breath, imbecile. Go get a towel. -Christophe, Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow — Lilith Saintcrow

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius. — Billy Wilder

On Closure
I don't think there's ever closure, " Bill says. He has thought about this. "I think whoever came up with that concept's an imbecile. — Ryan D'Agostino

What do you think an artist is An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is merely a boxer, only his muscle On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heartrending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness. — Pablo Picasso

I enrage myself with an imbecile. I say, 'I would like to kick him.' Instead I kick the table. I say, 'This table, it is the imbecile, I kick him so. — Agatha Christie

Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile. — Claude Debussy

The terms "idiot" and "lunatic" were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. "Imbecile" and "feeble-minded person" were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop. That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas. — Mary Roach

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four. — Umberto Eco

To believe everything is to be an imbecile.
To deny everything is to be a fool. — Charles Nodier

Any idiot or imbecile can easily make enemies; the important and the hard thing is to make friends easily and keep them as friends always! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile. — Albert Schweitzer

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain. — Nick Davies

An elementary school student asked me the NOT "politically correct" question, "Is an idiot smarter than a moron?" I had to Google it because I was afraid to respond in today's PC society and didn't want to offend him, his parents, or anyone else. Here's what I found.

Technically, a moron is smarter than an idiot. An imbecile is also smarter than an idiot.

Although today the words are considered insulting and derogatory, prior to the 1960s they were widely used as actual psychology terms associated with intelligence on an IQ test.

An IQ between:
00-25 = Idiot
26-50 = Imbecile
51-70 = Moron

Explaining all of this to a nine year old with an IQ of 130 made me feel like society has turned all adults into one of the above, myself included.

When I told him that I'm afraid to openly say it, the nine year old said, "Adults are idiots! — Ray Palla

If," we say readily, "God is holy and omnipotent, He would interfere and stop all this kind of thing"
meaning by "this kind of thing" wars, persecutions, cruelty, Hitlerism, Bolshevism, or whatever large issue happens to be distressing our minds at the time. But let us be quite sure that we have really considered the problem in all its aspects.
"Why doesn't God smite this dictator dead?" is a question a little remote from us. Why, madam, did He not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did He not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery? — Dorothy L. Sayers

I think Wallace Hall is an imbecile. — Joe Jamail

The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet; the second, an imbecile. — Gerard De Nerval

Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system — Aldous Huxley

Decidedly it was the policy of an imbecile. — Agatha Christie

In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be "me." (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.) — Christopher Hitchens

Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself. — Remy De Gourmont

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. — Noam Chomsky

Regrets, of course; only an imbecile did not have regrets. Regrets, some shame, a little guilt. But they had all done the best they could, they had raised their children well, educated them, housed them, made them safe and secure. They had all been good people. Death was never welcome but He always came. It was only to be truly lamented when He took the young, those neither prepared nor deserving of it. Then Death was cruel. Manolis watched the foam rise in the briki and he turned off the flame. — Christos Tsiolkas

What do you do,' said Jean, 'with, ah, "ungifted" children when you have them?'
'Cherish them and raise them, you imbecile. Most of them end up working for us, in Karthain and elsewhere. What did you think we'd do, burn them on a pyre?'
'Forget I asked — Scott Lynch

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you. — Marquis De Sade

The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile ... — Malcolm Muggeridge

Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? — C.S. Lewis

Great. I get to meet Jack Eversea, the Jack Eversea, and I act like a complete imbecile. It was so good Jazz wasn't here, she would have clobbered me by now. For that matter, she would have clobbered him and dragged him back to her lair. — Natasha Boyd

I don't care very much for literary shrines and hauntsI knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle's yard. And when I said, "Why throw a stone into Carlyle's yard?" she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject. — Carolyn Wells

I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there in the farthest rim of the universe. — Henry Miller

I will always choose to be an imbecile. I couldn't cut it as an old fashion, and dry gal. — Mary Sage Nguyen

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill. — H.L. Mencken

In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society's rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community's identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability. — Edouard Leve

When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile. — Glen Duncan

When I was young, I ran to see Astaire and Rogers, Huston, Lubitsch - they were formative for me. I also read 'Flash Gordon' when I was 6, but if I were still reading it when I was 16, I'd have been an imbecile. — Lina Wertmuller

A company is a moral imbecile. It has no sense of right or wrong. Any restraints have to come from the outside, from laws and customs which forbid it from doing certain things of which we disapprove. But it is a restraint that reduces profits. Which is why all companies will strain forever to break the bounds of the law, to act unfettered in their pursuit of advantage. That is the only way they can survive because the more powerful will devour the weak. And because it is the nature of capital, which is wild, longs to be free and chafes at each and every restriction imposed upon it. — Iain Pears

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Two imbecile parents, whether related or not, have only imbecile offspring. — Charles Davenport

By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton. — C.P. Snow

But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile. — Patrick O'Brian

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. — Robert E. Sherwood

No age or condition is without its heroes . The least incapable general in a nation is its Caesar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon , the least confused thinker its Socrates , the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare . — George Bernard Shaw

You mean to say that when an imbecile walks into a church, office, day care center, or school, stumbling about, almost zombie-like, with gun-filled hands at his side, blabbering incoherently to his next victim, the reaction of grown men and women is to run, cry, whimper, and hide under a desk or pew? The sheeping of America is nearly complete. — Ted Nugent

Graves leaned forward, eyeing me. "Hey, Dru. You were french-kissing a winged snake. creeptastic."
"I was stealing her breath, imbecile. go get a towel." christophe shoved him, and graves shoved back. — Lili St. Crow

Whatever characterization one may choose to place on Satan, "imbecile message maker" doesn't fit. This was no third-ranking demon out there in the wilderness throwing lines at Christ. This was the manic master who understood the power of words. He spun what he hoped would be a strike. He failed; Christ succeeded. They both used words. — William E. Jefferson

Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. — Ayn Rand

A person may be a moron or an imbecile if he is lacking in judgment; but with good judgment he can never be either. Indeed the rest of the intellectual faculties seem of little importance in comparison with judgment. — Alfred Binet

Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile - an idiot. — Edgar Allan Poe

I would rather be considered an imbecile, than an old fashioned and dry gal. — Mary Sage Nguyen

Penelope gulped down the tea she'd been in the process of sipping. Colin had a way of looking at a person, his green eyes so focused and intent that you felt as if you must be the only two people in the universe. Unfortunately for Penelope, it also seemed to have a way of reducing her to a stammering imbecile. If they were in the midst of a conversation, she could generally hold her own, but when he surprised her like that, turning his attention onto her just when she'd convinced herself she blended in perfectly with the wallpaper, she was completely and utterly lost. — Julia Quinn

The usage seems first to have made its appearance on the floor of the Convention in the context of insults. In February the deputy Thomas used the familiar form to rebuke Marat for one of his outbursts: "Shut up, you imbecile! — Timothy Tackett

I'm perfectly discriminating,' he said with a devilish smile.
'How's that? No blondes after Labour Day?'
'I said I was discriminating, not an imbecile. — Ally Blake

The imbecile always want to give suggestions in areas they know nothing about. There you have, arrogance and ignorance supporting one another and justifying the existence of both. You see it in the person that is single but insists in giving relationship advice to others, in the one that can barely keep his job but insists in giving suggestions about business and in those that insist that everyone should be more ethical but they, themselves, commit unethical actions. — Robin Sacredfire

And there it is! Bravo! I knew it was only a matter of time before Byron realized he had an audience. That man is simply incapable of keeping his shirt on when there are spectators. One Christmas Eve, he stripped his shirt off right in the middle of the choir's rendition of Oh Child of Bethlehem. Coincidentally, the next song was Come Let Us Adore Him and the imbecile actually launched into some interpretive dance. — Kirt J. Boyd