Einstein: "The Majority Of The Stupid Is Invincible And Guaranteed For All Time"

Alan: The above quotation is a false attribution. The following quotation is not.

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I salute the man who is going through life always helpful, knowing no fear, and to whom aggressiveness and resentment are alien. Such is the stuff of which the great moral leaders are made who proffer consolation to mankind in their self-created miseries. The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while. Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else-unless it is an enemy. Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions. The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency. In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep. The contrasts and contradictions that can permanently live peacefully side by side in a skull make all the systems of political optimists and pessimists illusory. Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

-Albert Einstein, May 23 1953