Intellectual Quotes - Page 19

• Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

  Alain de Botton

  Loss, Frustration, Losing

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• The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Smart, Men, Lazy

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• I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

  Adrienne Rich

  Real, Men, Males

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• ...as man under pressure tends to give in to physical and intellectual weakness, only great strength of will can lead to the objective.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  Men, Giving, Weakness

  Carl von Clausewitz (2008). “On War”, p.193, Princeton University Press

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• What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Art, Emotional, Self

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• The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above "functionally retarded".

  Tucker Max

  Florida, Levels, Retarded

  Tucker Max (2012). “Hilarity Ensues”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

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• LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

  Charles Bukowski

  Gun, Sick, Machines

  "Charles Bukowski : Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life". Book by Howard Sounes, 1998.

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• Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

  Stephen Fry

  Believe, Names, Mind

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• We're so different. You're an intellectual. I'm an idiot." "Don't say that," I yelled. "You're not an idiot, you stupid idiot.

  Melina Marchetta

  Stupid, Different, Idiot

  Melina Marchetta (1992). “Looking for Alibrandi”, p.296, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.

  Noam Chomsky

  School, Achievement, Black

  David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky (2001). “Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky”, p.19, Pluto Press

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• I have problems with a religion which says that faith in itself is enough for a ticket to heaven. In other words, that the ideal is your ability to manipulate your own common sense to accept something your intellect rejects. It's the same model of intellectual submission that dictatorships have used throughout time, the concept of a higher reasoning without any obligation to discharge the burden of proof.

  Jo Nesbo

  Burden Of Proof, Common Sense, Heaven

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• 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

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• There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Powerful, Political

  Noam Chomsky (1988). “The Culture of Terrorism”, p.29, South End Press

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• ...there is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them in a semi-crushing manner, while saying sternly, "You are a poo.

  Caitlin Moran

  Crush, Children, Lying

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• Wow,” I said. “Are you making this up?” “Hazel Grace, could I, with my meager intellectual capacities, make up a letter from Peter Van Houten featuring phrases like ‘our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity’?” “You could not,” I allowed. “Can I, can I have the email address?” “Of course,” Augustus said, like it was not the best gift ever.

  John Green

  Grace, Email, Phrases

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.69, Penguin

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• The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Loss, Sarcasm, Mind

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• The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Christian, Liars, Should Have

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• Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Moving, Comfort, Rooms

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1994). “Aphorisms”, Ariadne Press (CA)

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• A woman can be beautiful as well as intellectual.

  Audrey Hepburn

  Beautiful, Wells

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• It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.

  Steve Jobs

  People, Understanding, Saws

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• Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

  Philip Pullman

  Evil, Freedom Of Speech, Destroying

  "Pullman defiant over US protests against Northern Lights" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. September 29, 2008.

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• One of the great things about songwrighting; it's not an intellectual experience

  Keith Richards

  Great Things

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• It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.

  Albert Einstein

  Men, Invention

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.48, Open Road Media

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• If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe...they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect.

  Noam Chomsky

  Believe, Mean, Class

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• Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.

  Alan Watts

  Suicide, Commitment, Mind

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