Top 40 Quotes About Anti Intellectualism
#1. In a neurotic society, insane ideas can become 'normal', the current triumph of tribalism is the result of rabid global anti-intellectualism.
Martijn Benders
#2. Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
Johan Huizinga
#3. For more than a half-century, anti-intellectualism has had a pretty good run in presidential politics. In fact, Republicans would never have gotten where they are without it.
Peter Beinart
#4. Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel. Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs.
J.P. Moreland
#5. 'Let your yes be yes and your no be no for anything other than that is evil' NT (passim). This quote is not an adequate argument for 'anti-intellectualism' or the position that Reason & Faith are antithetical ".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#6. This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
Susan Jacoby
#8. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is - second only to American political campaigns - the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.
Larry Laudan
#9. There is a great superficiality in today's evangelical world. Many Bible-believing Christians share the contemporary case for self-gratification, emotionalism, and anti-intellectualism. Many people who believe in the Bible have never read it.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#10. There is a need for expertise, for real expertise. I'm not doing much to help that cause, but I think we can find the healthy balance between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Jocks and nerds may come together, I believe it.
John Hodgman
#11. Anti-intellectualism and fullness of the Holy Spirit are mutually incompatible. Wherever the Holy Spirit has given His freedom, truth is bound to matter.
John R.W. Stott
#12. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
Susan Jacoby
#13. There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.
Martin Amis
#14. Let's face it: every campus has its share of students who can't quite comprehend that extreme political correctness is often born of the same intolerance and anti-intellectualism as standard-issue bigotry.
Meghan Daum
#15. One must never underestimate the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.
Richard John Neuhaus
#16. In passing I draw attention to another English expression which often occurs in Dutch texts: "the real world". In Dutch - and I am afraid not in Dutch alone - its usage is almost always a symptom of a violent anti-intellectualism.
Edsger Dijkstra
#17. Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.
Os Guinness
#18. The mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity.
Maggie Nelson
#19. I asked many friends if Australian anti-intellectualism was still a living force and they all told me it was. If you are above average intelligence, hide this embarrassing fact.
George Mikes
#20. Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. (p. 19)
Robin R. Meyers
#21. Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrongheaded pseudointellectualism is far worse.
Jonathan Wilson
#22. I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.
Philip Plait
#23. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'
Isaac Asimov
#24. The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#25. I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#26. I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
Ben Lerner
#27. I'm going to insist that we've got decent funding, enough teachers, and computers in the classroom, but unless you turn off the television set and get over a certain anti-intellectualism that I think pervades some low-income communities, our children are not going to achieve.
Barack Obama
#28. The opposition to teaching evolution is, of course, almost always given a religious reason. That may usually be its real basis, but I think it is often a mask, perhaps unconscious, for underlying anti-intellectualism or antiscientism.
George Gaylord Simpson
#29. I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth.
Anais Nin
#30. He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.
Christopher Hitchens
#31. The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of their opposite. Fundamentalism and sophistry give piety and philosophy bad reputations with society.
John Mark Reynolds
#32. Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France seems to have realised that books are its real enemies.
Stendhal
#33. There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' and Braxton P. Hartnabrig on 'The Jamie Foxx Show.'
John Ridley
#34. High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.
Susan Jacoby
#35. To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment.
Mark A. Noll
#36. I do not think he (Chester Arthur) knows anything. He can quote a verse from poetry or a page from Dickens or Thackeray, but these are only leaves springing from a root out of dry ground. His vital forces are not fed,and very soon he has given out his all.
Harriet Blaine
#37. A large segment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a world in which it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments.
Richard Hofstadter
#38. The danger that American society as a whole will over-esteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that hardly troubles us.
Richard Hofstadter
#39. I'm not anti-intellectual, just anti-misery.
Marty Rubin
#40. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren't true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.
Tom Nichols
