Intellectual Obscurity Quotes

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.

He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.

There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.

The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it's probably your own fault.

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

University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity - a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence.

What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?