Trent Reznor Quotes

When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

So basically, I think music at its best can be everything. It can be totally stupid and very intellectual and emotional at the same time. I don't think all those things shut each other out.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too 'high art' - if you're not in the club, they're not going to let you join. It's like The Turin Shroud: don't touch it because it might fall apart.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

Philosophy is for the few.

No social class, intellectual category or art form is immune to the snob virus.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

I really like Adam Curtis' 'Century of Self.' It's about how artists have failed the general public by being so exclusive, like being in an echo chamber. I was definitely more like that in my early twenties - my music was completely inaccessible.

One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

Exclusiveness is a characteristic of recent riches, high society, and the skunk.

I'm not going into the cool club. It's not my address.

Hello there. I'm out social climbing, but if you leave your name and number and if you're anybody, I'll get back to you.

I think that theater is the closest medium to music. It's very pure. It's for the elite of the society. It's not for everyone in the society.

The more closed the circle, the more difficult it is for 'outsiders' to break in. Their very difficulty in entering may be taken as a sign of incompetence, a sign that the insiders were right to close their ranks.

Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don't like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen.

If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.

There are some people, who I'll charitably call snobs, who are dismissive of any conversation that doesn't begin with the full level of complexity. That's just not how the world works.

Reason can never be popular. Passions and feelings may become popular, but reason will always remain the sole property of a few eminent individuals.

Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.

As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.