Quotes About Fatuous

#1. Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth
an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials.

Geraldine Brooks

#2. What is Time, O sister of similar features, that you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that secondhand overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship!

Mervyn Peake

#3. In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity - and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.

James Baldwin

#4. Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.

Samuel Beckett

#5. The idea now that we're going to fight terrorism through gun control I think is just utterly fatuous.

Chuck Todd

#6. You have to be savvy to be a celebrity. You have to create a personality and shove that out. It just seems fatuous to me. Professionally, it's a good idea. But I can't do it.

Rupert Graves

#7. You have to go back to the Children's Crusade in 1212 AD to find as unfortunate and fatuous an attempt at manipulated hysteria as the Women's Liberation Movement.

Helen Lawrenson

#8. No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

Samuel Butler

#9. Doesn't it show us all that we are silly little boys or fatuous asses to think that we can play golf without making a lot of bad shots?

Bobby Jones

#10. One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.

Alastair Campbell

#11. The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

Stendhal

#12. A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.

Daniel J. Levitin

#13. Hypatia, like all girls who intend to be good wives, made it a practice to look on any suggestions thrown out by her future lord and master as fatuous and futile.

P.G. Wodehouse

#14. He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and

Henry James

#15. We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

Northrop Frye

#16. Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.

Henry James

#17. Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.

Stephen Fry

#18. A clock with no hands. "Freedom!" is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is. A

David Mitchell

#19. Was it for this the clay grew tall? O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen

#20. Lolita... is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.

Orville Prescott

#21. You ... you don't look like a Jew,' she heard him mumble. 'What does a Jew look like, you fatuous bastard'? - 'Do you think I should have a nose like a boat hook, you stupid old prick!

Ben Elton

#22. The shuffle only demonstrated people's fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.

Brian Aldiss

#23. Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.

Max Lerner

#24. Fatuous words I don't trust you I trust silence
More than beauty more than anything
A festival of understanding

Frantisek Halas

#25. It's certainly easy to mock some things ... Oddly enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous - perhaps it's just me.

Stephen Fry

#26. Before taking her into the library, my wife told me she was an old friend in a marriage crisis. A fatuous lie; at her age there are no crises left in marriage, only acceptance and extraction. (General Villiers)

Robert Ludlum

#27. We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions - and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.

A.S.A Harrison

#28. No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.

H.L. Mencken

#29. How outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?

Margaret Atwood

#30. I have been unsure, from the start, what the Occupy movement was all about, although I did suspect that it was just fatuous, anti-enterprise, left-wingery.

Nigel Farage

#31. For him, the writer should be the very devil, a disturber of dreams and wrecker of fatuous utopias, the bringer-in of reality, and rival of God in his wish to make worlds.

Hanif Kureishi

#32. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, orKnights oftheIsoscelesTriangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another.

Theodore Roosevelt

#33. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.

Henry Miller

#34. All the little gods of irony must whoop and weep and roll on the floors of Olympus when they tune in on the night thoughts of a truly fatuous male.

John D. MacDonald

#35. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

Erich Maria Remarque

#36. Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester's cap and bells.

Michel Foucault

#37. Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import. Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous.

Ameen Rihani

#38. Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

David Mitchell

#39. How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life

Thomas Merton