Top 24 Dunces Quotes & Sayings

The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.

When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.

The use of proverbs is characteristic of an unlettered people. They are invaluable treasures to dunces with good memories.

In fame's temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels, or successful butchers of the human race.

The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.

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.

ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

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.

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.

What am I then...? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity and old age all have brought me their thoughts....their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.

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?

Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.

I like characters like Ignatius Reilly in 'A Confederacy of Dunces' and Ricky Gervais's character in 'The Office.' They think one thing about themselves, but the truth is as far from that as it can be. So I began to think about how to put that kind of character in a book for kids.

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.

VITUPERATION, n. Saite, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer from an impediment in their wit.

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.

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.

We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

Not all celebrities are dunces.

Our armed forces, not our parliament of dunces, are our pride. Doubting our armed forces' integrity and honesty is a disgraceful travesty.

I would like to see 'A Confederacy of Dunces' by John Kennedy Toole adapted.

A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.

sanity, in my opinion, is an achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who were not dunces.