Quotes About Dumbing Down

#1. 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

#2. I'm generally pessimistic about the dumbing down of America - especially with summer movies.

Elmer Bernstein

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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 And then, of course a few months later, he's been replaced by someone you haven't met.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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Stephen Sondheim

#14. In pursuit of happiness, smart people often end up dumbing down themselves.

Erol Ozan

#15. 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

#16. True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down.

Isaac Asimov

#17. The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Carl Sagan

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Sam Neill

#21. 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

#22. If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

Henry A. Kissinger

#23. The power itself comes from the fact that you can do something and people can't see you do it and what kind of responsibility do you have when you can do it. What kind of good things can you do or can you do good things from being invisible in this way?

Trenton Lee Stewart

#24. 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

#25. Why is this interesting? Why are we watching?

Kate Tempest

#26. 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

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

SonReal

#28. I think women tend to write about how violence feels, whereas men tend to write about what violence looks like.

Mark Billingham

#29. The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience.

Natasha Pulley

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

Danica McKellar

#31. And I'm leaving you that plant," he lamented. "You are good with plants, aren't you?"
Great, I lied. (I could make the Congo wither and die...)

Wilton Barnhardt

#32. The sheer magnitude of Speaker Pelosi's spending spree is mind boggling. Most of us do not use the number 1,000,000,000,000 in our daily lives, so it is difficult to attach tangible value to the figure.

Geoff Davis

#33. 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

#34. I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

Kurt Vonnegut