Intellectual Laziness Quotes

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. ~ Jason Fried

Workaholism

Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all- nighters and sleep at the office. It's considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.

Workaholics make the people who don't stay late feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass- in- seat mentality - people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren't really being productive. If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra eff ~ Jason Fried

Faith is intellectual laziness. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable - from table tapping to the superiority of their own children - has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it
especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton. ~ George Eliot

Visa for Avalon is a testament to the power of fiction. It illuminates the truth at the heart of what is commonly called reality. This account of lives transformed and ruined by the triumph of a totalitarian rule is a timely reminder of how moral and intellectual laziness and apathy can pave the road to the reign of terror brought on by such a system. ~ Azar Nafisi

[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for - not his action, but in fact - the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one's character - driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity. ~ Ashim Shanker

Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. ~ Joseph Goebbels

Intellectual freedom begins when one says with Socrates that he knows that he knows nothing, and then goes on to add: Do you know what you don't know and therefore what you should know? If your answer is affirmative and humble, then you are your own teacher, you are making your own assignment, and you will be your own best critic. You will not need externally imposed courses, nor marks, nor diplomas, nor a nod from your boss ... in business or in politics. (from the essay The Last Don Rag) ~ Scott M. Buchanan

Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement. ~ B.F. Skinner

Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began once again to keep late hours... ~ Marcel Proust

The Greek in me wanted to know what it felt like to pull an oar. The intellectual wondered about how to get eight individuals to move to the same beat. The athlete wanted to check what has been described as the ultimate workout. The romantic craved seeing if the quirkiness of the sport - there is after all, little practical value to oarsmanship in the postindustrial age - stirred his blood. ~ Barry S. Strauss

Truth, says instrumentalism, is what works out, that which does what you expect it to do. The judgment is true when you can "bank" on it and not be disappointed. If, when you predict, or when you follow the lead of your idea or plan, it brings you to the ends sought for in the beginning, your judgment is true. It does not consist in agreement of ideas, or the agreement of ideas with an outside reality; neither is it an eternal something which always is, but it is a name given to ways of thinking which get the thinker where he started. As a railroad ticket is a "true" one when it lands the passenger at the station he sought, so is an idea "true," not when it agrees with something outside, but when it gets the thinker successfully to the end of his intellectual journey.

Truth, reality, ideas and judgments are not things that stand out eternally "there," whether in the skies above or in the earth beneath; but they are names used to characterize certain vital stages in a process which is ever going on, the process of creation, of evolution. In that process we may speak of reality, this being valuable for our purposes; again, we may speak of truth; later, of ideas; and still again, of judgments; but because we talk about them we should not delude ourselves into thinking we can handle them as something eternally existing as we handle a specimen under the glass.

Such a conception of truth and reality, the instrumentalist believes, is in harmony with the gener ~ Holly Estil Cunningham

Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one 'hegemonic discourse' in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead. ~ David Denby

Doing nothing is very hard to do ... you never know when you're finished. ~ Leslie Nielsen

She wasn't born in the normal way. She was literally born from
thoughts. Her children are born the same way. When Athena falls in love with a mortal man, it's purely intellectual, the way she loved Odysseus in the old stories. It's a meeting of minds. She would tell you that's the purest kind of love. ~ Rick Riordan

Baker has done it again! Building on the core principles that he advanced in Professional's Guide to Value Pricing and The Firm of the Future, Ron Baker has again evolved thought leadership on the critical dynamics of value and pricing. Baker's latest work, Pricing on Purpose: Creating and Capturing Value, provides real-world examples and practical strategies that provide a framework for pricing optimization. His clarity of purpose and passionate call to action resonates in today's intellectual capital economy. ~ Thomas Finneran

When you conform to the monoculture's version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life. Being able to draw on many different stories, not just the economic one, allows you to creatively and authentically meet the challenges that face you in your life. The monoculture, determinedly single-minded, insists that economic values and assumptions can be used to solve your problems, whether those problems are spiritual, political, intellectual, or relational. ~ F.S. Michaels

The men of sense, the idols of the shallow, are very inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts. ~ Claude Adrien Helvetius

Man cannot be enlightened through any organization, creed, dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through understanding the contents of his own mind, through observation, not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. ~ Radhanath Swami

Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous. ~ Ben Bradlee

Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle. ~ Russell Kirk

But, you see, if being an intellectual means you like to learn, that you're curious and attentive and can admire things and be moved by them and try to understand how it all hangs together, and try to go to bed a bit less stupid than the day before, well, then yes: not only am I an intellectual but I'm proud to be one. Really proud, even. ~ Anna Gavalda

You're saying Stevie's problems are because we taught him to believe in Santa Claus?" asked Step, incredulous. "On the contrary. I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial, for when the child is finally allowed - or forced - to recognize the nonexistence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience in maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to her at any given time." "So Santa Claus is good," said Step. "Santa Claus is usually not maladaptive," said Dr. Weeks, ~ Orson Scott Card

Everybody has a capacity for a happy life. All these talks about how difficult times we live in, that's just a clever way to justify fear and laziness. ~ Lev Landau

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual. ~ Oscar Wilde

The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year. ~ Steve Martin

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it. ~ Cynthia Ozick

YOU CANNOT IMAGINE YOU ARE IN A POSITION TO EFFECT A SHUTDOWN, BYRON."
"Can't I?" Zhang's eyes are wide now, gleaming with something new
a kind of madness to match the computer's. Not the look you want to see on the face of an enemy as intelligent as this one.
"DID WE NOT ESTABLISH THIS DURING YOUR FAILED ATTEMPTS ON THE BRIDGE? YOU CANNOT HOPE TO MATCH ME. MY COMPUTATIONAL POWER IS ALMOST INCALCULABLY SUPERIOR TO YOURS. TO ONE SUCH AS MYSELF, YOU ARE THE INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENT OF A PROTOZOA."
"True." Zhang pauses, glancing into the emergency supply cupboard, gaze lingering on something inside. "But I have something you and protozoa don't."
"AND THAT IS?"
"Hands, mother******. ~ Amie Kaufman

The cause of laziness is physiological; it is an infirmity of the constitution, and its victim is as much to be pitied as a sufferer from any other constitutional infirmity. It is even worse than many other diseases; from them the patient may recover, while this is incurable. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf 's first novel is a self-conscious meditation on the formation of an emergent intellectual and artist (a Ku¨nstlerroman). ~ Jane Goldman

In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds. ~ Philip Johnson

An entrepreneur is born, when a person has more reasons to drive his dreams against his excuses. ~ Sukant Ratnakar

The forefathers of the United States were children of religious bigotry and persecution, and, as a result, fled Britain to create a new approach to life and government. They valued intellect and education. In fact, they outlined the principles of the United States' democracy to establish intellectual freedom from the Church. ~ Mike Medavoy

For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be
obeyed in order to subjugate history. It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek. Nietzsche,
at least, foresaw what was going to happen: "Modern socialism tends to create a form of secular
Jesuitism, to make instruments of all men"; and again: "What we desire is well-being. ... As a result we
march toward a spiritual slavery such as has never been seen. . . . Intellectual Caesarism hovers over
every activity of the businessman and the philosopher." Placed in the crucible of Nietzschean philosophy,
rebellion, in the intoxication of freedom, ends in biological or historical Caesarism. The absolute negative had driven Stirner to deify crime simultaneously with the individual. But the absolute affirmative leads to
universalizing murder and mankind simultaneously. Marxism-Leninism has really accepted the burden
of Nietzsche's freewill by means of ignoring several Nietzschean virtues. The great rebel thus creates with
his own hands, and for his own imprisonment, the implacable reign of necessity. Once he had escaped
from God's prison, his first care was to construct the prison of history and of reason, thus putting the
finishing touch to the camouflage and consecration of the nihilism whose conquest he claimed. ~ Albert Camus

But it isn't true," Orville responded emphatically, "to say we had no special advantages . . . the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity. ~ David McCullough

True blessing comes in the dress of sweats, never delaying to wave bye to the excuses and procrastination. True blessing lies in hard work! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. ~ Sigmund Freud

I can think of no habit, kept up through the years, that binds a married couple more than that of reading good books together. Domestic problems and personal problems are for the time forgotten, and an intellectual intimacy is established that can be maintained in few other ways. ~ Alice Hegan Rice

Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. ~ Dan Simmons

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge. ~ Theodor Adorno

Collaboration operates through a process in which the successful intellectual achievements of one person arouse the intellectual passions and enthusiasms of others. ~ Alexander Von Humboldt

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [ ... ] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness - in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture. ~ George Eliot

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher. ~ William Glasser

Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education. ~ Charlotte M. Mason

My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher. ~ James Tobin

Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be. ~ Reid Hoffman