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Heaven and earth fight in vain against a dunce!
Sep 30, 2025
Fool beckons fool, and dunce awakens dunce.
For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.
ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.
VITUPERATION, n. Saite, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer from an impediment in their wit.
The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.
There is no one who is without faults, and who is not in some way a burden to others, whether he is a superior or a subject, an old man or a young one, a scholar or a dunce.
As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce.
There is no dunce like a mature dunce.
Nothing can confound a wise man more than laughter from a dunce.
In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.
Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.
The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.
A Zen master used to say, It is clear and so it is hard to see. A dunce once searched for a fire with a lighted lantern. Had he known what fire was, he could have cooked his rice much sooner.
We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.
Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking.
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam, excels a dunce that has been kept at home.
Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.
Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.
When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.
Not all celebrities are dunces.
A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.
It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.
Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.
I have always been the dunce, the never-do-well of the family, I've always have to pay double for my deeds, first with the scolding and then again because of the way my feelings are hurt.
The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result.
When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
I have known several persons of great fame for wisdom in public affairs and councils governed by foolish servants. I have known great ministers, distinguished for wit and learning, who preferred none but dunces. I have known men of valor cowards to their wives. I have known men of cunning perpetually cheated. I knew three ministers who would exactly compute and settle the accounts of a kingdom, wholly ignorant of their own economy.
...And another item from the growing file of people who voluntarily wear dunce caps... You'll be talking cordially to someone and make an offhand reference, 'I recently read where--' and they'll cut you off and say, 'Oh, I don't read'... This is a tragedy on so many different levels. First, because they don't read, they don't know enough to keep it to themselves. Next, and this is the most amazing part, they use a demeaning tone like I'm the stupid one for wasting time with books.
In fame's temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels, or successful butchers of the human race.
It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms,--let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.
Slang is a foul pool at which every dunce fills his bucket, and then sets up as a fountain.
Wit, who never once Forgave a brother, shall forgive a dunce.
Book - Learning : The dunce's derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impertinent ignorance.
sanity, in my opinion, is an achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who were not dunces.
Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?
with the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.
I'm not eager to jump into marriage again. I'm in the corner right now, wearing my dunce cap. That area is obviously a nightmare.
Trying to find this industry's tendency to celebrate the physical is a waste of time. So I'm happy to play the game. But I am also thirsty for input. I'm not a dunce whose only skill is knowing how to take a photograph, you know? And at the end of the day, I think it makes me slightly less replaceable.
Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces.
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education--the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap--and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.
Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters; But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
Only by himself, with one acre and a house, will a dunce be a dunce. Once he manages to gain power, he'll turn into a scoundrel.
A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers-or should I say, nurses?-will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.