Quotes About Pedantic

#1. Why is it that the less on has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#2. The sign at the door was written with a backward R, to make it look Russian, which caused a minor echo of panic. Was it a reference to Merchenko? No, surely Westwood knew the difference between Russia and Ukraine. But were there Ukrainian-themed bars, for a pedantic tormentor?

Lee Child

#3. If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

#4. To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

George Santayana

#5. 'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.

William Congreve

#6. Of course, some people, when they're nervous or afraid, turn pedantic. And if you don't know what pedantic means, here's a clue: in the dictionary, I'm the illustration they use.

Michael Grant

#7. I think topical songwriting is a real gift, and it's hard not to be pedantic and show up with the sledgehammer message.

Mary Chapin Carpenter

#8. Such pedantic apotheosis is reached by so few, and when parishioners are left without their guiding star, we can only desperately cling to the last intimations of a passing titan.

Michelle Franklin

#9. A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking; and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do.

Niklaus Wirth

#10. Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.

Michel De Montaigne

#11. Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.

A.A. Gill

#12. Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible? ... Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#13. Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.

Alberto Manguel

#14. You were wrong," she told Paul, because he had been a pedantic asshole who thought he was right about everything. "You said I would be dead in a gutter by now. You said I was worthless. You said that no one would believe me because I didn't matter.

Karin Slaughter

#15. Earth to Dexter, Astor said, and I realized that I still stood in front of them frozen in my unlikely, foolish openmouthed pose like a pedantic zombie.

Jeff Lindsay

#16. Where the hell has the fourth tower gone?!"
As far as heckles go, it was one of the more unusual he'd been subjected to. Lawrence had spent hours finding an alliterative rhyme for 'crumbling crenellations' - and what thanks did he get? An architecturally pedantic heckle.

Peter Knighton

#17. A lot of political music to me can be rather pedantic and corny, and when it's done right - like Bruce Springsteen or Jackson Browne or great satire from Randy Newman, there's nothing better.

Bonnie Raitt

#18. Youth, youth- something savage- something pedantic. For example there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don't palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one.

Virginia Woolf

#19. Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Desiderius Erasmus

#20. To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

William Hazlitt

#21. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn't know how to sell the product.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#22. Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be.

Fran Lebowitz

#23. Life is complex and prone to being pedantic
Always little things crawl, flutter
and creep in.
Nesting in cracks in our psyches
Gibbering, whispering and scratching
on sanity's walls.
Messages without form or reason
Teasing us to come out
And blend in.

Neil Leckman

#24. A person of fifty-four who is still so pedantic and small-minded must be so by nature, and will never improve.

Anne Frank

#25. There are surely worse things than being wrong, and being dull and pedantic are surely among them.

Mark Kac

#26. But tormented souls have this incredible ability to recognize and approach one another, thus compounding their grief.
Why hadn't I noticed this in him? Why did I see only the superficial way he talked about politics or the pedantic way he tasted the wine?

Paulo Coelho

#27. Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic.

Diane Ackerman

#28. You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#29. Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks.

James D. Watson

#30. It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

J. Maarten Troost

#31. I was a pedantic child. I'd get really annoyed at the logic of small things that don't bother anyone else.

Peter Baynham

#32. Cynical, self-deprecating, affected, indiscriminate, patronizing, immature, as sloppy intellectually as he was with his desk, fickle, vain, virile, brooding, pedantic, philandering...in short, Byronic, Byronic, Byronic, almost to the point of parody.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

#33. The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#34. The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues ...

Freya Stark

#35. I was a kid and a little pedantic but I still maintain I had a point.

Don DeLillo

#36. There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact - I will ever say pedantic - observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.

Winston Churchill

#37. There are indeed ducks in Blackford Pond." "On it," muttered Isabel. "What?" "On the pond. There are ducks on the pond. There are fish in it." Even as she spoke, Isabel had no idea why she was being so pedantic, and

Alexander McCall Smith

#38. He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.

J.K. Rowling

#39. "Science" is pedantic, arrogant, esoteric and often insane.

Herbert M. Shelton

#40. It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.

Edmund Burke

#41. For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible

Arthur Schopenhauer

#42. People sometimes think that defining a term is pedantic and useless, but terms need to be defined if they're going to be discussed, even if the terms are only defined for a single conversation. Those involved in the conversation need to know how the terms are being used.

Pattiann Rogers

#43. Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest.

Emily Dickinson

#44. Swear programmers code them to be annoying, pedantic little fucks.

Ann Aguirre

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

Cassandra Page

#46. But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.

Plato