Intellectual Hubris Quotes

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.

What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we are never going to die - an infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it : the sense that we can engulf this inconcievable universe with our minds.

I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.

The problem with humans is that they are unable to handle their own intelligence.

The only stupidities that are not easily solved are those created by very intelligent men.

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.

An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

The only thing worse than a silly politician analyzing art is a silly artist analyzing politics

There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make.

Young people have been ill-educated, mis-educated, propagandized. I see it in everything I read written by young people. You can spot it a mile away, their ignorance. And it's coupled with they think they're the only people that know. They're arrogant. They're a little bit smarmy about what they think they know and nobody else does, which is a characteristic of young people anyway. I was that way when I was young.

The scientific-rational mindset is as much a cosmology as the Catholic mindset was in the Middle Ages; scientists are so proud of their mindset and convinced that it's the only reality. I find that worrying.

There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.

I have always suspected that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is a boon to people who don't have deep feelings; their pleasure comes from what they know. . . . But this only emphasizes the difference between the artist and the scholar.

If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.

Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

My understanding of religion and science is that they're both arrogant schools of thought, and whether they acknowledge it or not they continually broadcast the idea that they have the world figured out. And what they don't know, they have a theory for which is probably correct. It feels like that shrinks the world, rather than expands it.