94 Dumbing Down Quotes

Following is our list of dumbing down quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about dumbing down examples.

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Famous Dumbing Down Quotes

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance. — Carl Sagan

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

The downward spiral of Dumbness in America is about to hit a new low. — Hunter S. Thompson

There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan. — Malcolm Turnbull

Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim, rather than to learn. — Spiro T. Agnew

We have the media, which is such a waste in the sense that you can actually feel your IQ get lower as you watch TV. — Michio Kaku

By following a strict prescriptive method, we become dumber, because we lose the ability to think for ourselves. — Mo Gawdat

PowerPoint makes us stupid. - James Mattis

PowerPoint makes us stupid. — James Mattis

Standardization of our educational systems [which includes testing]is apt to stamp out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up. — Harvey Cushing

We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Simplify, then add lightness. — Colin Chapman

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. — Susan Jacoby

Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. — Gertrude Stein

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity. - John Forbes Nash

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity. — John Forbes Nash

Short Dumbing Down Quotes

  • Simplification is one of the most difficult things to do. — Jonathan Ive
  • The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. — Hans Hofmann
  • Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age. — Malcolm Muggeridge
  • Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality. — Thomas Sowell

Dumbing Down Image Quotes

Dumbing down quote The saddest thing for a girl to do is dumb herself down for a guy.
The saddest thing for a girl to do is dumb herself down for a guy.

Dumbness Quotes

Guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal will be about socializing...uh, um...Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies. — Maxine Waters

People say, 'The government couldn't carry out the September 11th attack, it's too big, they'd get caught!' They DID get caught! They're just counting on you to be dumb and to go along with it. — Alex Jones

The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people. — Stephen Hawking

Dumbing down quote Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinkng. They want obedient workers, people
Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinkng. They want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.

You know, it really doesn`t matter what the media write as long as you`ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass. — Donald Trump

Quotes are for dumb people who can't think of something intelligent to say on their own. — Bo Burnham

It takes a smart brunette to play a dumb blonde. - Marilyn Monroe

It takes a smart brunette to play a dumb blonde. — Marilyn Monroe

Dumbing down quote I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50 and it's 3% good and 97% stup
I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50 and it's 3% good and 97% stupid.

I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged. — Antonin Scalia

Inherited hatred (i.e. hatred your parents schooled you in) is not only stupid, it is destructive - why make your only driving force hate? Seems really f***ing dumb to me. — Lemmy Kilmister

Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated. — Ibn Khaldun

I don't think there's anybody in this organization not focused on the 49ers...I mean Chargers. — Bill Belichick

Dumb Decisions Quotes

Arianna Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man - he made a good decision. — Donald Trump

Outstanding long-term results are produced primarily by avoiding dumb decisions, rather than by making brilliant ones. — Warren Buffett

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it. — Cormac McCarthy

Strategic plans cause more dumb decisions than anything else in America. — Charlie Munger

I was under medication when I made the decision to burn the tapes. — Richard M. Nixon

The way that we make dumb decisions and discriminatory decisions is by employing stereotypes about groups of people. We don't see people as fully human when other people speak for them. — Rachel Maddow

How I wish we could all see the cost of our choices as clearly as a price tag on items in a store. If I know how much something is going to cost me, I make much wiser choices. But we have an enemy who schemes against us to keep the cost of dumb decisions concealed until it's too late. — Lysa TerKeurst

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong. — Michael Lewis

When you get a lot of money thrown at you, you can make some dumb decisions without the right advice. — Peyton Manning

We made this really dumb decision to put on the cover nothing from South Park but just a real life photo of a piece of pooh dressed up like Mr. Hankey, and a lot of people didn't, they didn't even know what it was. — Trey Parker

Dumb Things Quotes

The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life. — Jaggi Vasudev

I am the voice of the voiceless; Through me the dumb shall speak. Till the deaf world's ears be made to hear. The wrongs of the wordless weak. And I am my brothers keeper, And I will fight his fights; And speak the words for beast and bird. Till the world shall set things right. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. — Donald Trump

Dying with a lot of money is a Dumb Thing! — MrBeast

I remember, when I was a young guy in the SEAL teams, I was very afraid of making mistakes and looking stupid or doing dumb things and getting a bad reputation. — Jocko Willink

Courage is a hard thing to figure. You can have courage based on a dumb idea or mistake but you’re not supposed to question adults or your coach or your teacher because they make the rules. Maybe they know best but maybe they don’t. It all depends on who you are, where you come from. — Michael Oher

It's a humbling thing being humble. — Maurice Clarett

And every stone and every star a tongue, And every gale of wind a curious song. The Heavens were an oracle, and spoke Divinity: the Earth did undertake The office of a priest; and I being dumb (Nothing besides was dumb) all things did come With voices and instructions. — Thomas Traherne

To ignore death and to be afraid of it is dumb because everyone is going to face it at some point. If you look at death and the reality of it, you realise that we're all going to die, so let's use this time on Earth to be positive and do good things. — Ray Toro

And hey, it's okay to laugh at yourself sometimes, I do dumb things all the time (haha). But when it get's too personal, get your tough skin on and stand firm. — Christina Grimmie

People Writing About Dumbing Down

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge
quotes on jesus

140 2456
Read quotes by Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan
quotes on love, death and education

571 5077
Read quotes by Danica McKellar

Danica McKellar
quotes on leadership, life and education

91 776
Read quotes by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson
quotes on life, death and love

510 5126
Read quotes by Malcolm Turnbull

Malcolm Turnbull
quotes on education, leadership and slavery

72 630
Read quotes by Spiro T. Agnew

Spiro T. Agnew
quotes on leadership, education and government

50 858

More Dumbing Down Quotes

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. — Carl Sagan

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization. — Fredric Jameson

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie. — Geoffrey Hill

I'm generally pessimistic about the dumbing down of America - especially with summer movies. — Elmer Bernstein

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

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

True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down." — Isaac Asimov

People are always talking about the dumbing down of the country. — Woody Allen

The big problem in the long process of dumbing down the schools is that you can reach a point of no return. How are parents who never received a decent education themselves to recognize that their children are not getting a decent education? — Thomas Sowell

It's in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There's no system to avoid bad markets. You can't do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go. — Charlie Munger

Music has always pushed ahead social movements and can do much more than just dumb down a populace. — Saul Williams

When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. — Steve Jobs

The great danger of the new media is that it seems to relish the superficial. There has been an ethos within the Church for many years to pursue an accommodationist strategy in regards to the culture, and this has resulted in a public presentation of the Faith that is often nebulous or "dumbed down." — Robert Barron

The saddest thing for a girl to do is to dumb herself down for a guy. — Emma Watson

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF. — Dan Simmons

We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb. — Marge Piercy

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

I miss being able to wake up when I want and go on stage when I want and pull down my pants when I want. — Mark Wahlberg

Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent. — Walter E. Williams

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating. — Alan Kay

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago. — Steven Johnson

If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down. — Elizabeth Taylor

I don't think you need to dumb down to a child, you merely have to be clear, you know? — Mary Chapin Carpenter

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

When you drink fluoridated water, you're drinking liquid Prozac. You drink enough of it, even though it's a small amount, drink it for decades and decades and what does Prozac do to you? It dumbs you down; it makes you docile. — Jesse Ventura

So many shows out there dumb-down the country. It's so admirable to be part of a show that wants people to think. — David Krumholtz

Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard. — Danica McKellar

Don't dumb it down. The audience is smart and gets what you are doing. — Bruce Paltrow

Americans have been dumbed down to the point where more people watching 'American Idol' than listen to the state of the union address. And that's too bad. I'm not trying to take any bread out of the mouth of Simon Cowell, but if the president is speaking to the people of the United States, and people are going to watch 'American Idol,' that's sad. — Henry Rollins

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

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

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

Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. — Charles McGrath

A secular approach is not a dumbing down, it's not reductively identifying Buddhism with one or two particular techniques of meditation, but it is actually a complete world view and way of life in this world. — Stephen Batchelor

Every time I have a bikini wax, Cameron Diaz holds me down. — Gwyneth Paltrow

Often when you get a really good script, and you receive the new pages, you see that the entire thing has been dumbed down. Films in the '30s and '40s, that were huge blockbusters, were very sophisticated in their language, and the ideas they brought. There were no questions about whether the audience would get it or not. — Connie Nielsen

With the Democrats, they see themselves, we see ourselves as the party of the working folks, the striving, you know, the good. But, without anybody acknowledging it, there is now this little camp of folks who come across as very elitist, that look down on red state voters, who think that Republicans are dumb people. — Van Jones

I felt like my vote was the vote that put [Obama] into office. It was down to one vote, and that was going to be my vote. And that may not be true, but that's how much power it felt like I had. — Puff Daddy

Kids that are allegedly better students are in an elitist class in first and second grade and then they go to their high schools, they go to their universities and the normal dumb shits like me are down at the bottom. These people go to elitist schools and they replicate their elitist thoughts in the corporations. — Paul Orfalea

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data. — Toni Morrison

Those of us with a microphone who are blessed with the gift of being in the public eye have a special opportunity to give voice to all those groups whose activism is sometimes ignored or put on the back pages with the the dumbing down of television and the tabloidization of journalism. As Ralph Nader called it, "sound barks," not even sound bites. — Bonnie Raitt

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

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