We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.
If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.
An institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.
Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility. "
While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, - in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.
If all boys could be made to know that with every breath of cigarette smoke they inhale imbecility and exhale manhood. . . and that the cigarette is a maker of invalids, criminals and fools-not men-it ought to deter them some. The yellow finger stain is an emblem of deeper degradation and enslavement than the ball and chain.
Nothing betrays imbecility so much as the being insensible of it.
The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
Rage is mental imbecility.
It's true, I do love the semi-epiphany. For example, in "Fall Line," the character's final decision is less epiphany than imbecility. He makes a choice, which the conflict hangs upon - whether to seek fame or actually change his life - and so, his decision is tied to the central conflict and his own hubris.
A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.
