Pseudo Intellectual Quotes

There's something I believe wholeheartedly: Cynicism is the true refuge of the pseudo-intellectual, .. Cynicism is easy. Joy is an extremely advanced spiritual and intellectual tenet. ~ Craig Ferguson

Has she," asked the Doctor, with a smile, "has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women - super-spiritual superior beings? My wife has been telling me about them. ~ Kate Chopin

By some need to appear intellectual, non-thinkers will instantly and without question subscribe to the opinions of those they feel other people think are educated. ~ Criss Jami

New Rule: Gun-control people have to stop pressuring Starbucks to ban guns. I want my gun nuts overcaffeinated, twitchy, and accident-prone. That way, the problem will take care of itself. Plus, if just one gun nut kills just one pseudo-intellectual writing a screenplay-slash-graphic-novel on his iPad, natural selection is doing its job. ~ Bill Maher

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion ... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce
render emotional
his audience, each time. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I think that anti-Jewish prejudice is an unfailing sign of a sick and disordered person ... It's a horrible, conspiratorial, pseudo-intellectual, mean spirited, eventually lethal piece of bigotry. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The stolen ideas, words, and quotes do not make you a unique author. You are only a thief of the literature, and pseudo-intellectual. ~ Ehsan Sehgal

In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day. ~ Fred Rodell

When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence. ~ Ingmar Bergman

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed. ~ Frederick C. Beiser

Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space. ~ Nicholas Murray Butler

Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach. ~ Ian McEwan

If in matters of faith and belief children are at risk of being swept downstream by this intellectual current or that cultural rapid, we as their parents must be more certain than ever to hold to anchored, unmistakable moorings clearly recognizable to those of our own household. It won't help anyone if we go over the edge with them, explaining through the roar of the falls all the way down that we really did know the Church was true and that the keys of the priesthood really were lodged there but we just didn't want to stifle anyone's freedom to think otherwise. No, we can hardly expect the children to get to shore safely if the parents don't seem to know where to anchor their own boat. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. ~ David Lynch

Why we don't value intellectual honesty beyond easy answers is beyond me. ~ Kelly Corrigan

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism. ~ Milan Kundera

Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic. ~ Bill Viola

A decayed body is not made the least more aesthetic by a brilliant mind, indeed the highest intellectual training could not be justified if its bearers were at the same time physically degenerate and crippled, weak-minded, wavering and cowardly individuals. What make the Greek ideal of beauty a model is the wonderful combination of the most magnificent physical beauty with brilliant mind and noblest soul. ~ Adolf Hitler

When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,-no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was actually already doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience when September 11 happened. 'The End Of Faith' is essentially what September 11 did to my intellectual career at that moment. ~ Sam Harris

Today's left would have us forget that the pseudo-science of eugenics was once all the rage among socialists. ~ Rand Paul

George Bush's political, intellectual and other shortcomings cannot be restricted to one sentence. ~ Emilio Botin

He described the securities - called Abacus - to a girlfriend: I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself 'Well, what if we created a "thing," which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?').15 ~ John Kay

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality. ~ Aldous Huxley

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride. ~ Russell Kirk

So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you'll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The deepest insult which can be shown to a human being is to associate it solely with material functions, with no cognizance and no consideration of its intellectual and spiritual power. ~ Mary C. Ames

At the inception of this writing project, I considered the wisdom of executing a purposeful slaughtering of my egotistical self. If I do screw up the temerity to commence with an autopsy of a soulful self, I might lack the fortitude to stay the course to dissect the nature of my being. Without deep-seated faith, I risk faltering at the operating table and never rising again. Will I suffer from a desertion of boldness? Alternatively, will a stunning lack of talent and criminal absence of cognitive insight, perception, and discernment along with a paucity of intellectual and practical acumen betray me when I attempt to whisk up incomplete mental fragments previously abandoned to simmer in the deepest recesses of my animalistic being? Overwrought by a hovering sense of terror concerning what filthy rubbish I might discover lurking within the hallways of my afflicted soul, I am hesitant to descend into the labyrinth of the unknown. I might not endure to write about what fate awaits me when I attempt to harpoon protean personal thoughts steeped in fear and disgust. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture. ~ Alex Kozinski

The controlled-experiment people felt that public LSD orgies would lead to disaster for their own research. There was little optimism about what might happen when the Angels - worshiping violence, rape and swastikas - found themselves in a crowd of intellectual hipsters, Marxist radicals and pacifist peace marchers. It was a nervous thing to consider even if everybody could be expected to keep a straight head ... but of course that was out of the question. With everyone drunk, stoned and loaded, there was nobody capable of taking objective notes, no guides to soothe the flip-outs, no rational spectator to put out fires or hid the butcher knives ... no control at all. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I question whether any Turk, of all that have entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I hounour the barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman. ~ Thomas De Quincey

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. ~ Jane Jacobs

The intellectual who wants to do her work properly must today go back to the starting point: the woman whom she knows, and first of all to herself. It is at that level, and at no other, that she ought to begin to think about the world situation. ~ Jacques Ellul

In some sense our aim ought to be to convert the school from an academic institution into an intellectual one. That shift in the culture of schooling would represent a profound shift in emphasis and in direction. ~ Elliot W. Eisner

The guesses which serve to give mental unity and wholeness to a chaos of scattered particulars, are accidents which rarely occur to any minds but those abounding in knowledge and disciplined in intellectual combinations. ~ John Stuart Mill

I've been surrounded by nitwits my entire life. ~ Chelsea Ballinger

Divine Providence is connected with Divine intellectual influence, and the same beings which are benefited by the latter so as to become intellectual, and to comprehend things comprehensible to rational beings, are also under the control of Divine Providence, which examines all their deeds with a view of rewarding or punishing them ... the method of which our mind is incapable of understanding. ~ Maimonides

The foolish thing was trying to solve the problem all by myself. But the deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems can't be solved as intellectual problems are. That's what I discovered about myself last night. ~ Anonymous

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Intellectual: One who knows no craft. ~ Idries Shah

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology. ~ Eric Allman

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'. ~ Sebastian Horsley

The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. . . . ~ David McCullough

I love California,' he reiterated many times. 'You live in one of the choice places on earth.' He continually stressed how much he liked the variety and experimentation in lifestyles, as well as the marvelous climate, which allows people to stay in touch with the body, to literally see the body.
'And you have such intellectual freedom and vitality here,' he said. 'Ideological dogma and partisanship are still so rampant in France that compared to California we live in France under an intellectual reign of terror. ~ Simeon Wade

And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books. ~ Henry Beston

When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans. ~ Elizabeth Moon