Thomas Sowell On Intellectuals Quotes

#1. Tis not the robe or garment I affect; For who would marry with a suit of clothes?

John Heywood

#2. Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.

Thomas Sowell

#3. I put more pressure on myself to do well. I know how good I can be and I don't want to fall short of that.

Tyler Thornburg

#4. Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.

Thomas Sowell

#5. Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.

Thomas Sowell

#6. The rabbit was not domesticated until early medieval times (it was bred by French monks in the belief that newborn bunnies were fish and therefore exempt from the prohibitions against eating meat on certain days in the Church calendar);

Carl Sagan

#7. Nature never deceives us;
it is always we who deceive ourselves.

Scott Lynch

#8. Advancement only comes with habitually doing more than you are asked.

Gary Ryan Blair

#9. The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.

Thomas Sowell

#10. He looked at me now.
"Remember I said, 'what if I didn't want to fix your bike?'"
I remembered. "Yes ... "
"I didn't want to fix it, because I liked driving you places.

C.J. Duggan

#11. Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.

Thomas Sowell

#12. I couldn't do it at all. I was never really good at it, but I can't imagine what it can be like as a fortunate person not having to deal with it. I mean, people of all ages, not just my age, 25, 35, all the way down the line.

Stockard Channing

#13. But sometimes I'd feel more fulfilled making Christmas cards with the mentally ill. I want to live and I want to love. I want to catch something that I might be ashamed of.

Steven Morrissey

#14. [beware that] many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing.

Thomas Sowell

#15. There is no such thing as high returns without risk.

Gerry Schwartz

#16. Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.

Thomas Sowell

#17. She had what I'd call a lemming ass - that is, an ass that you would follow right over the edge of the cliff.

Andrew Davidson

#18. Intellect is not wisdom.

Thomas Sowell

#19. Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are
and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.

Thomas Sowell

#20. Mr. Ellison is like a pomegranate: messy, leaves stains, more seeds than meat, but you pick one by one and discover all the little bits were worth it.

Avra Amar Filion