Intellectual Complacency Quotes

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and even aggressive. The man who makes his entry by leaning against an infirm door gets an unjustified reputation for violence. Something is to be attributed to the poor state of the door.

The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of [intellectual] sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination

At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.

Doubting everything and believing everything are two equally convenient solutions that guard us from having to think

The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and dote on past achievement.

Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

I don't like the fact that no one has any imagination anymore. It doesn't pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone. Nobody wants you to think about anything new or use your brain or make anything interesting because everything important has already been made. America is over; it's done being brilliant.Everything genius has already been built, like all the great works of art have already been produced.

In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!

If, in any individual, university training produces a taste for refined idleness, a distaste for sustained effort, a barren intellectual arrogance, or a sense of superfluous aloofness from the world of real men who do the world's real work, then it has harmed that individual.

Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don't think I'm the first to say that.

People who are looked up to in America will often say, 'I don't get math.' And they'll often say it like they're being humble, but they seem almost proud of it because it's acceptable to act this way.

The popular scientific books by our scientists aren't the outcome of hard work, but are written when they are resting on their laurels.

There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person

The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.

It's a closing of the mind that happens when you want to be lazy and go with the easiest answers, like the media do all the time in their sound bytes.

How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.