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# Weekend Words: Imbecile
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-imbecile/
- Published: 2016-02-07T14:22:52.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:29:54.000Z
- Description: This week, Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, invoked the Fifth Amendment before a House committee investigating the company's fiftyfold price increase of a decades-old drug.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:17 (2016, 2017, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/02/imbecile.jpg)

Hieronymus Bosch, “The Ship of Fools in Flames” (n.d.), pen and bistre, 176 x 153 mm. Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna (Image via Web Gallery of Art)

This week, Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, [invoked](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/business/drug-prices-valeant-martin-shkreli-congress.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) the Fifth Amendment before a House committee investigating the company’s fiftyfold price increase of a decades-old drug. Shkreli later tweeted,”Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government.”

> Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.  
>  
> **—Albert Schweitzer**

> An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark — that is critical genius.  
>  
> **—Billy Wilder**

> What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy. Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error: the pride and refuse of the universe.  
>  
> **—Blaise Pascal, *Pensees***

> The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.  
>  
> **—John Arbuthnot Fisher**

> As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.  
>  
> **—Ernest Renan**

> When I was young, I ran to see Astaire and Rogers, Huston, Lubitsch — they were formative for me. I also read ‘Flash Gordon’ when I was 6, but if I were still reading it when I was 16, I’d have been an imbecile.  
>  
> **—Lina Wertmuller**

> To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.  
>  
> **—Robert E. Sherwood**

> So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.  
>  
> **—Herman Melville, *Moby-Dick***

> We are a country of millions of fools, who believe the most imbecile things about ourselves and the world, but when it comes to poetry only solemnity counts and joking is un-American.  
>  
> **—Charles Simic, interview, *The Paris Review*, 2004**

> We are the same people  
> only further from home  
> on freeways fifty lanes wide  
> on a concrete continent  
> spaced with bland billboards  
> illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.  
>  
> **—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, *A Coney Island of the Mind***