George Orwell Quotes

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

I don't consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.

I want to prove you don't need to have academic syntax to be intelligent.

I have a good mind but I don't like to bore anyone with it.

I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts.

I'm more cerebral than I want to be.

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.

[Warren] Harding is incapable of thought, because he has nothing to think with.

A second-class intellect—but a first-class temperament!

Governor [Robert R.] Livingston is confessedly a Man of the first rate talents, but he appears to me rather to indulge a sportiveness of wit, than a strength of thinking

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.

I don't like to say it, but I don't care, I'm a real-life genius.

"Beauty fades," my father would tell me, "but dumb? Dumb is forever."

I'm not what you call your basic intellectual.

Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance. -Doc

So in his very politically-incorrect way, I think [James Mattis] is a good counterpart to Donald Trump, who doesn't read books.

According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians.

Intelligence is called the world's second oldest profession for a reason. Everyone does it.

I've seen it over the years, the more intellectual they are, the more work they don't want to do. You have to do both, you have to be able to put in the graft.