Pedants Quotes

#1. It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

Eric Hoffer

#2. We see that pedantry has never been held in such esteem for the government of the world as in our times, and it offers as many paths of the true intelligible species and objects of infallible and sole truth as there are individual pedants.

Giordano Bruno

#3. Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

Steven Pinker

#4. The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

Ray Bradbury

#5. Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.

Wilkie Collins

#6. The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

H.L. Mencken

#7. Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Alfred North Whitehead

#8. Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connoisseur appreciates only individual works.

Franz Grillparzer

#9. Silence is a trick when it imposes. Pedants and scholars, churchmen and physicians, abound in silent pride.

Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

#10. Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

Jonathan Swift

#11. Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.

Vladimir Nabokov

#12. The nudes of art are not so distant from pornography as prudish pedants pretend.

Mason Cooley

#13. O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation

Jeremy Bentham

#14. Education jargon is the language of pedants; it identifies those who have so little confidence in themselves and their work that they seek to create a veil of words to hide them.

Ted Sizer

#15. God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers, who try to teach God his job as Creator.

Elie Faure

#16. Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine?

Giordano Bruno

#17. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#18. History and war are cruel pedants. Those who know too little of the former are likely to have too much of the latter.

Oliver North

#19. The search for truth in cyberspace will take you through the wormhole, and there's nothing on the other side but pedants and nitpickers and bottomless ambiguity. If you're not careful, you'll spend all your time proving everything and understanding nothing.

Mike Rowe

#20. Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.

Wilfrid

#21. He who comes from the kitchen, smells of its smoke; and he who adheres to a sect, has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student; and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

#22. Autocorrect: making Twitter pedants delete and re-tweet since 2007.

Cassandra Page

#23. The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves ...

Peter Drucker

#24. A fool is only troublesome, a pedant insupportable.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#25. The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant.

Sir Fulke Greville

#26. A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.

Thomas Carlyle

#27. To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.

William Hazlitt

#28. If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.

Miguel De Unamuno

#29. Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!

Franz Grillparzer

#30. Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#31. When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature then we the pedant.

Confucius

#32. He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.

Jean De La Bruyere

#33. The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians
and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

H.L. Mencken

#34. Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion
a form of knowledge without the power of it.

Joseph Addison

#35. He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.

Stefan Zweig

#36. Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning.

Charles Caleb Colton

#37. The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.

Lord Chesterfield

#38. A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant.

Jean Antoine Petit-Senn