Tag: principal skinner

“Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

From: The Simpsons

Genre: Cartoons, Television

Who said it?: Principal Skinner

The story behind the quote: This week’s quote comes from the longest running animated series in the United States, The Simpsons. The show has been on for numerous seasons and counting and is a general smorgasbord for quotes.

The quote comes from the 5th season episode, entitled “The Boy Who Knew Too Much.” In the episode, Bart Simpson passes a fake note to his teacher to skip school. Principal Skinner (voiced by Harry Shearer) rightfully believes the note is fake and tries to catch Bart in the act of truancy. He goes to the places he liked to visit as a kid but neither sees Bart no any other truant children. He starts second guessing himself but then dismisses it, delivering the quote.

Geek wisdom: As time moves on, things change. What was once okay can be thought of as despicable later down the line. The opposite can also be true in that what was once thought of to be terrible can turn out to be okay in the future. All we can do is adapt to the new situation and never stay rigid in our own ways.

“Me fail English? That’s unpossible!”

From: The Simpsons

Genre: Cartoons, Television

Who said it?: Ralph Wiggum

The story behind the quote: GeekWisdom has been running for more than a year now and I’ve never posted a quote from one of the longest running series of all time. The Simpsons has been on air for over 24 seasons, had a feature-length film and has entered pop culture consciousness but this is the first time a quote is being posted here. One of the reasons is because I can’t embed most of the Simpsons video clips on YouTube. Another is, well, nothing really is super memorable from the main cast… but I forgot about Ralph Wiggum.

Ralph is the dim-witted son of the dim-witted Police Chief of Springfield, Clancy Wiggum. He tends to do incredibly odd things that are pretty stupid and he has the tendency to make unrelated comments with the situation he’s in. Unfortunately, it seems that he’s pretty much in the dark about his clue about how clueless he really is.

In the clip below, Principal Skinner is announcing the children who are failing in English. Ralph is overjoyed and actually thinks he won something. When Principal Skinner corrects Ralph, he smiles and expresses disbelief since he thinks he’s really great in speaking the language.

Geek wisdom: We can be extremely ignorant of our own… ignorance. We like to believe that we are so totally awesome and great. However, it’s totally possible that we’ve put ourselves on an extremely high pedestal and actually fail to see our own… well, failures.

It’s easy to be blind to our own weaknesses. We sometimes have to take a long, hard and impartial look at ourselves to really see who we are.