Intellectual Stagnation Quotes

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Just as iron rusts from disuse... even so does inaction spoil the intellect.

Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.

Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.

In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio... But after 1400? Nihil.

[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically , the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically , it is the erosion of ambition. The political goal presupposes the two others. The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

Throughout history, humankind has been resistant to change and to the acceptance of new ideas... When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, the astronomers of that time refused to accept or even to look at these satellites because the existence of these moons conflicted with their accepted beliefs. So it is now with psychiatrists and other therapists, who refuse to examine and evaluate the considerable evidence being gathered about survival after bodily death and about past life memories. Their eyes are tightly shut.

Any belief that puts itself beyond doubt nurtures its own collapse.

Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart.

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

Weak minds think alike.

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

The Democrat Party have no education in critical thinking or common sense or common sense perception. None of it. They just seethe when they hear this stuff because it's all creating knee-jerk reactions: "Racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe! Racist, sexist, bigot! Racist!" It's paralyzing us, folks, as a country. We are in a state of paralyses. These people are retarding our progress.

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

Some are even so absurd as to suppose, that the stock of original ideas is exhausted.

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper

Idleness is more an infirmity of the mind than of the body.

Science is an intellectual dead end, you know? It's a lot of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.