Intellectual Quotes - Page 18

• Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.

  Bertrand Russell

  Progress, Adequate, Opinion

  Bertrand Russell (1957). “Why I am not a Christian, and other essays on religion and related subjects”, Touchstone

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Ideas, History

  11 Copy quote

• Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.

  Percival Everett

  Art, Stupid, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property; it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.

  Stewart Baker

  Technology, People, Important

  4 Copy quote

• You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

  Noam Chomsky

  Truism

  4 Copy quote

• People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.

  Ayn Rand

  Knowledge, Blessing, Thinking

  "Atlas Shrugged". Book by Ayn Rand, Part Two: Either-Or, Chapter One: The Man who Belonged On Earth, p. 346, 1957.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.

  Orson Scott Card

  Understanding, Doe, Belief

  4 Copy quote

• Science would not be what it is if there had not been a Galileo, a Newton or a Lavoisier, any more than music would be what it is if Bach, Beethoven and Wagner had never lived. The world as we know it is the product of its geniuses-and there may be evil as well as beneficent genius-and to deny that fact, is to stultify all history, whether it be that of the intellectual or the economic world.

  Norman Robert Campbell

  Science, Evil, Would Be

  Norman Robert Campbell (1953). “What is science?”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of such things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots knew!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Atheist, Voice, Judging

  "The Will to Power".

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• A l'intérieur de ce corps vivait l'âme d'une intellectuelle et poète dont personne n'avait le soupçon. Within this body lived the soul of an intellectual and poet, which nobody had suspected.

  Antonio Tabucchi

  Soul, Body, Soup

  4 Copy quote

• It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity," "truth," it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Truth, Science, Men

  "Against Method". Book by Paul Feyerabend, 1975.

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

  Clive James

  Corruption, Tendencies, Ideology

  Interview with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. August 3, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true.

  Bertrand Russell

  Integrity, Thinking, Fundamentals

  21 Copy quote

• Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Fashion, Past, Knowing Nothing

  39 Copy quote

• How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?

  Edward Abbey

  Controversial, Interest

  Edward Abbey (2006). “Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.

  John Green

  Cancer, Eye, Grace

  "The Fault in Our Stars". Book by John Green, 2012.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Tired, Sadness, Loss

  69 Copy quote

• I don’t really know what “intellectual” means, but if it means you’ve got a desire to learn, you’ve got a desire to look for things that haven’t been presented to you, then, maybe. I think that “intellectual” is quite an exclusive word. I think it’s just for anyone that has a thirst or a hunger to improve themselves, or a yearning to escape from somewhere to get to a better place.

  Pete Doherty

  Mean, Thinking, Desire

  62 Copy quote

• To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

  George MacDonald

  Fall, Home, Wonder

  George MacDonald (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)”, p.13217, Delphi Classics

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.

  Stephen King

  Believe, Guy, Different

  4 Copy quote

• Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Heart, Exercise

  6 Copy quote

• If one's intellectual equipment was not great, one's spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one's very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Spiritual, Men, Effort

  11 Copy quote

• The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Ideas, Creative

  Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft”, p.59, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.

  Thomas Mann

  Art, Passion, Adventure

  20 Copy quote

• The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

  Alan Watts

  Wise, Philosophy, Ignorance

  7 Copy quote