Idiot America Quotes

“America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have knocked over and spilled on everything.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“The United States is an easy country to love because you can take it on faith that, at some point in every waking hour of the day, there is among your fellow citizens a vast exaltation of opinions that test the outer boundaries of the Crazoid.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Nevertheless, four years later, at the end of August 2004, a Zogby poll discovered the critical fact that 57 percent of the undecided voters in that year's election would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry.
The question was odd enough on its face, but a nation to which it would matter is odder still. Be honest. Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with nuclear launch codes?”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Idiot America is a strange, disordered place. Everything is on the wrong shelves. The truth of something is defined by how many people will attest to it, and facts are defined by those people’s fervency. Fiction and nonfiction are defined by how well they sell. The best sellers are on one shelf, cheek by jowl, whether what’s contained in them is true or not. People wander blindly, following the Gut into dark corners and aisles that lead nowhere, confusing possibilities with threats, jumping at shadows, stumbling around. They trip over piles of fiction left strewn around the floor of the nonfiction aisles. They fall down. They land on other people, and those other people can get hurt.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“A politician discussing his religion now refers to himself as a “person of faith,” which tells you more about the politician’s balls than it does about his soul. He doesn’t have enough of the former to call himself “religious,” because that leads to the question of which religion and why he chooses to follow it and not one of the dozens of others, or none of them at all. Such questions cause actual thought to break out, something that all modern politicians endeavor to avoid.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“We will have to remember where our cranks belong in our national life, so that they can resume their proper roles as lonely guardians of the frontiers of the national imagination, prodding and pushing, getting us to think about things in new ways, but also knowing that their place is of necessity a lonely and humble one. There is nothing wrong with a country that has people who put saddles on their dinosaurs. It’s a wonderful show and we should watch them and applaud. We have no obligation to climb aboard and ride.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Nobody goes to a zoo to dream about dragons.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“This is that moment in the hangover in which you discover that your keys are in your hat, the cat is in the sink, and you attempted late the previous night to make stew out of a pot holder. Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have been knocked over and spilled on
everything.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Politics is beginning to gather itself into an election season in which the price of a candidate's haircuts will be as important for a time as his position on war. The country is entertained, but not engaged. It is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“It’s not that there is less information on television than there once was. In fact, there is so much information that “fact” is now defined as something believed by so many people that television notices their belief, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“At that exact moment, Nancy Grace, a CNN legal commentator who combines the nuance of a sledgehammer with the social graces of a harpy..”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“By comparison, George W. Bush was light and breezy and apparently forgot during one debate that Social Security was a federal program. In fact, his depth, and his unfamiliarity with the complexities of the issues, to say nothing of the simple declarative sentence, worked remarkably to his advantage.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country’s politics. And religion has been sold there solely as a product.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to the standards of that context, any scientific theory is turned into mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“To demand to know is the obligation of every American. That it occasionally leads people down blind alleys, or off to Atlantis, is to be celebrated, not scorned.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“What nobody anticipated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they would meet inevitably in the heart of Idiot America. Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking spaces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to fill the niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Anything is true if it's said loud enough.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“It was a huge and expensive demonstration of Hofstadter’s argument: The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America—Greil Marcus’s old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who’s sold out.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Fact is what people believe.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“Any idea is true if it sells the books.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“It’s not that there is less information on television than there once was. In fact, there is so much information that “fact” is now defined as something believed by so many people that television notices their belief, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it. Just don’t be boring. And keep the ratings up, because Idiot”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“In her book, The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby mercilessly lampoons the very American notion that, because there are two sides to every question, both deserve respect and both must, in some way, be true. The Gut tells us that this is only fair, and we are a fair people, after all. All one has to do is muster an argument with enough vigor, package it well, and get enough people to buy both the idea and the product through which it is expressed. The more people buy, the more correct you are. The barriers that once forced American cranks to adapt or withdraw- or even merely to defend- their ideas all have fallen. It is considered impolite to raise them again, almost un-American, since we are all entitled to our opinion.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“And why not? “Faith-based” is another dishonest term for a dishonest time. It’s a word for people too cowardly to call themselves religious and it is beloved by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith. It was eagerly adopted by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do either one, because it conforms to the Three Great Premises. It’s a cheap salesman’s term of art, something you’d use to pitch a television program or a breakfast cereal. It even sounds like an additive—“ faith-based”—an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It’s camouflage under which religion is sold like smuggled goods in places where it doesn’t belong. To call something “faith-based” for the purposes of hiding the clearly sectarian character of what you’re actually talking about is to admit that there really is no difference between what went on at Lourdes and what went on at Roswell.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free