Word: stupidity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
PEOPLE SOMETIMES leave an Ionesco play feeling stupid. A crazy avalanche of absurdity has careened down and bowled them over, and they're left almost punchy, distanced from the world. Some intellectual force of habit makes them feel uneasy, as though they are missing out by not having a clear picture of what arises out of Rhinocerous or The Bald Soprano--some coherent and all-embracing recollection of a theme on all its levels...
...Karin stays at the table, fingers a broken shard, and repeats to herself, "It's all a tissue of lies." When Anna helps her undress, she sees the servant smiling dumbly at her; she slaps Anna, and then apologizes. The nurse is not mocking her; she is only stupid, and can't comprehend Karin's hatred. After the peasant leaves, Karin takes the fragment of glass, and cuts into her clitoris. Her face at first breaks into a contemptuous grin; then into a parody of an orgasmic expression. She joins her husband, lies on their bed, and lifts her nightgown...
...wife described her spouse as "uninspiring." More than one-fourth of the wives charged that their husbands had committed adultery-and many of the younger women had responded by taking lovers of their own. Why did many others remain faithful? "I haven't betrayed him because I am stupid," explained one. Said another: "I'm always pregnant, that...
Reading an Alger novel, Playwright S.N. Behrman once said, is like taking a shower in innocence. Alger could not hate even his villains. The kidnapers in Silas Snobden's Office Boy are half hearted scoundrels, outstandingly stupid rather than wicked...
...supporting the Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Vietnam, the American anti-war movement will be inviting charges that it is betraying American soldiers in the field. The movement has survived these attacks in the past, and it will survive them again. The people of this country are not stupid, and they can see easily enough who is responsible for the fact that Americans are being shot at and killed in Vietnam. Government apologists have long tried to argue that the blame for the American deaths should be placed not on the men who sent Americans to die in Vietnam...