Intellectual Bias Quotes

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

Intellectuals have a tendency to see poverty as a great moral problem to which they have a solution. The human race began in poverty, so there’s no mysterious explanation as to why some people are poor. The question is why have some people gotten prosperous, and in particular, why have some gotten prosperous to a greater degree than others. But everybody started poor so poverty is not a mystery to be solved by intellectuals. Intellectuals have no interest in what creates wealth and what inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned about the distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists somehow.

Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called 'income distribution'.

Being an actor is looked at like a prolonged game of dress-up. America puts movie stars on pedestals. In college, it's the flip side. I sometimes have to justify my job to my professors because they're focused on intellect and ideas.

Intellectuals love Jefferson and hate markets, and intellectuals write most of the books. Intellectuals often think that they should, for the benefit of mankind, act as fiduciaries for the clods who don't have to be intellectuals, and I suspect that has to do with [why historians love Jefferson and not Hamilton, even though Hamilton's vision of America's commercial future was vastly more accurate than Jefferson's].

The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to-- ironically-fait h!

Most people are not intellectuals — a fact that intellectuals have terrible trouble coming to terms with.

The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.

One thing I don't want around me is a military intellectual. I don't have to worry about you on that score.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

If the person you are trying to diagnose politically is some sort of intellectual, the chances are two to one he is a Democrat.

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.

Because I had an accent, people had this impression that I was dumb.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.

Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they are specialized, are just as ordinary, pig-headed, and unreasonable as everybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous.

Universities used to be places where the major political and social issues of the day could be researched and debated. The results of this careful thought and analysis were used to make political debates in the wider world more realistic and better informed. All that has now been turned on its head. The campus offers not a reasoned corrective to partisan passions, but fierce, one-sided advocacy of dangerous and destructive ideas.

It is a hard thing for intellectuals to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.

Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity.

Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?

You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.

The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.

Prejudice of the learned. - The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now know better than any other age.