He was a learned and brilliant man, one of the best jurists in Europe and with flashes of penetrating insight, and yet in his dealings with other people, particularly when he tried to be ingratiating, he was capable of an abysmal stupidity that can have come only from a complete incomprehension of human nature and human motives.

Here was another human who understood the stupidity of quarreling with the inevitable.

The air of Abdera was proverbial in Athens as causing stupidity, but the city counted among its citizens the philosophers Democritus, Protagoras and Anaxarchus, and historian and philosopher Hecataeus of Abdera.

There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides ; and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities in his own person, in his own acts.

Ribbentrop told the head of Hitler's Press Office, Fritz Hesse, that the Munich Agreement was " first-class stupidity ... All it means is that we have to fight the English in a year, when they will be better armed ... It would have been much better if war had come now ".

Explaining this, he stated that at a 1984 Minutemen show, a fan struck MacKaye's younger brother Alec in the face, and he punched the fan back, then realizing that the violence was " stupid ", and that he saw his role in the stupidity.

Huxley's ' aesthetic self-indulgence ' and indifference to humanity would lead to suffering or stupidity, and he concluded the book was irresponsible, if not quite immoral, to encourage young people to try the drug.

" He also wrote that there was " beastliness in the Russian nature ” as well as " cruelty and stupidity ”, and other comments which may be construed as anti-Russian.

A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story " Logic of Empire " (" You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity "); this was noticed in 1996 ( five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation ) and first referenced in version 4. 0. 0 of the Jargon File, with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of " Heinlein's Razor ".

Although Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, was of royal blood, he was commonly viewed as a criminal, prone to violence and stupidity.

It was really a wonderful experience musically, and it just went into the realms of stupidity.

One whole episode, 1981's Drugs, was constructed completely around the pie-in-the-face gag: to avoid the wrath of the censors, the episode showed the cast getting " high " by pieing themselves continuously over and over, comparing the stupidity of hitting oneself with a pie to the stupidity of taking drugs.

John Derbyshire, who says he has " complicated and sometimes self-contradictory feelings about Jews ", wrote on National Review Online regarding what he saw as the Jewish overreaction to the article that " It was a display of arrogance, cruelty, ignorance, stupidity, and sheer bad manners by rich and powerful people towards a harmless, helpless young writer, and the Jews who whipped up this preposterous storm should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves ".

The sequence has become known as the " rake joke " and was described by Entertainment Weekly as showing " genius in its repetitive stupidity.

The name William Pratt may allude to horror actor Boris Karloff, whose birth name was William Henry Pratt, and can also be understood as the British slang term " prat ", describing a person of arrogant stupidity.

After the end of World War II it was still used by Soviet propaganda as an example of stupidity of pre-war Polish commanders, who allegedly did not prepare their country for the war and instead wasted the blood of their soldiers.

Betts v. Brady initially decided that, unless there were special circumstances like illiteracy, stupidity or being in an especially complicated trial, there was no need for a court-appointed attorney.

* Lucius Junius Brutus, who feigned madness until the time when he was able to drive the people to insurrection — he more faked stupidity than insanity, causing the Tarquins to underestimate him as a threat.

A daft road sweeper most frequently seen in the Nag's Head, he came to adopt the ' village idiot ' role, drawing laughs in each of his scenes through his general stupidity, in particular his unshakable belief that Rodney's real name was actually Dave.

Hitler ordered Joseph Goebbels to convey his condolences to Viktor ’ s wife Paula and son Viktor Jr. Goebbels, in his diaries, had already described Lutze as a man of " unlimited stupidity " but at his death decided he was a decent fellow.

After the end of World War II the same fraud was again being disseminated by Soviet propaganda as an example of the stupidity of Polish commanders and authorities, who allegedly did not prepare their country for war and instead wasted the blood of their soldiers.

In an often quoted remark, Gould stated, " Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists — whether through design or stupidity, I do not know — as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms.

Regarding this period in his life, he later said, " I have no excuse ( for ) such unbelievable stupidity ...

He is the master of the Placebo Syndrome, which causes unFunkiness ( a combination of stupidity and no dancing ).

There is no such thing as a " left-handed screwdriver "; to be sent to find one is a fool's errand, often used as a test of stupidity, or is used as a metaphor for something useless.

In the Tathagatagarbha Sutra, the Buddha is portrayed telling of how, with his buddha-eye, he can actually see this hidden " jewel " within each and every being: " hidden within the kleśas contaminants of greed, desire, anger, and stupidity, there is seated augustly and unmovingly the Tathagata's wisdom, the Tathagata's vision, and the Tathagata's body [...] all beings, though they find themselves with all sorts of kleśas, have a tathagatagarbha that is eternally unsullied, and replete with virtues no different from my own ".

Thus, only mistakes relating to the factual basis of what is being attempted can form this defense and, in the majority of situations, it will only offer limited benefit to a defendant of ordinary capacity since the state owes no general duty to save citizens from the effects of their own ignorance or stupidity.

He is a bumbling despot who seeks to rule Mobius and control the world, but his plans are always foiled by Sonic, in no small part due to Scratch and Grounder's stupidity.

One of them, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wrote that " the eyes, by themselves, would be attractive, I suppose, only her gaze has no depth -- the kind in which transparency and naivete meet with lifelessness and stupidity ... How it irks me to see her in the place of the dear, wise, and graceful Empress!

Betts v. Brady initially decided that, unless there were special circumstances like illiteracy, stupidity or being in an especially complicated trial, there was no need for a court-appointed attorney.

In another deadpan statement after the hearing, he stated " I've since watched a couple of Steven Seagal movies and realised that pressure points are no laughing matter ," but he also acknowledged his own " stupidity " in the controversy.

Meanwhile, Trebek makes little to no effort to hide his contempt for the celebrities ' stupidity, and in return, is bombarded with sophomoric insults from Sean Connery.

He also mocked what he called " the stupidity of the magazine employees who were assigned the task of smearing me and my book ", and concluded by saying that Sante was " a young man of no reputation in the field of popular culture.

Each time Lula appears they cast him with a different surname, usually mocking something he has done recently, like, for instance " Luiz Ignorácio Lula da Silva ", when he claimed that he had no knowledge of the Mensalão scandal ( Ignorância is " ignorance " in Portuguese, and means both " lack of knowledge " and " stupidity ").

He discovers that the town's idiocy is no accident, that it is a 200-year curse of stupidity cast on them by Vladimir Yousekevitch after his son killed himself because the first Sophia Zubritsky ( not the doctor's daughter, but rather an ancestor with the same name ) was forbidden to see Vladimir's son by her father, who found out the boy was illiterate, and made to marry another man.

"... nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.

Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with the Nazis, for which he never apologized nor expressed regret, except in private when he called it " the biggest stupidity of his life " ( die größte Dummheit seines Lebens ).

The New York Times reviewer wrote that The Jerk " is by turns funny, vulgar and backhandedly clever, never more so than when it aspires to absolute stupidity.

* Mordecai Richler in his ironic " Barney's Version " ridicules the stupidity of court speeches when the prosecutor ends his opening speech with " murder is murder is murder.

General George S. Patton — when asked about the Siegfried Line — reportedly said " Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity.

Though she respects Groo's prowess as a warrior, Chakaal is all too aware of his incompetence in other areas, as well as his general stupidity and lack of social graces, and finds Groo at best tolerable when she is in need of his sword, and contemptible otherwise.

Arthur Lourié called the theme a " trite, intentionally silly motif ," adding, " This tune can be whistled by any Soviet man on the street ...." ( Coincidentally, Conductor Evgeny Mravinsky echoed Lourié when he called it a generalized image of spreading stupidity and triteness.

* Groophar-In Monstrous Regiment, Jade defines " groophar " ( in the context of " groophar stupidity ") as " when, right, a daddy troll an ' a mummy troll --" before getting cut off

It is actually debatable if he dislikes talking to Rat or Pig more, Rat for his ego and self-centered remarks, which anger Goat greatly ; However, Pig's stupidity has, on multiple occasions, equally driven Goat over the edge, particularly when he attempts to explain something simple to Pig, and Pig continues moving further and further into the wrong direction and misunderstanding everything Goat says.

Odie tosses Garfield Jon's bowling ball, and when Garfield curses Odie for his stupidity, the extra weight added by the bowling ball causes the tree branch to break and send Garfield falling to the ground.

Eccles also possessed remarkable stupidity when dealing with physical objects ; in " The Greatest Mountain in the World " he describes two sticks of dynamite as " What luck!

But I cannot bear the idea of being an anti-communist with the same stupidity and spite as when I was an atheist and blasphemer.

Further, when Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in October 1967, Pound described his previous work to Ginsberg as: " A mess ... stupidity and ignorance all the way through.

In Aesop's Fables, the jackdaw embodies stupidity in one tale, by starving while waiting for figs on a fig tree to ripen, and vanity in another-the daw sought to become king of the birds with borrowed feathers, but was shamed when they fell off.

Despite Rat-Man's antics and stupidity, he always remains by his side and helps him, even when his master loses his fortune.

During one experiment, while commenting on Homer's stupidity, the doctors find a crayon lodged in Homer's brain from a childhood incident when he stuck sixteen crayons up his nose and was unable to sneeze one of them out.

" It was a burden he carried, an ineradicable interest for the essence of stupidity, its mammoth strength, its invincibility because the stupid never are inhibited of shame and never are contrite when others feel ashamed over them.

In spite of his stupidity, Kelso was shown on several occasions not to be immature, simply unmotivated ; when he was either forced to or chose to, Kelso displayed startling intelligence unbecoming of his usual personality or hijinks.

The situation is further worsened when Smalls realizes that the ball was autographed by Babe Ruth, and is almost irreplaceable, and the team rebukes him for his stupidity for playing with such a valuable ball.

Despite his all around ineptitude, stupidity, and lack of enthusiasm, when properly motivated Priest can display a certain low cunning.

In addition to the physical comedy that Harry brings to the show, his naivety and slow-wittedness are other sources of amusement, especially when his apparent stupidity gives way to absurdity, such as when Harry declares it is his mission to " bring electricity to the people of Earth.