Horace Porter Quotes

… when we know a thing we have only scorn for other people who don’t happen to know it.

Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.

A lot of times when you're around really, really smart people, you don't really understand them.

I'm not being condescending, I'm too busy thinking about far more important things you wouldn't understand.

Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

The bookful blockhead ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always list'ning to himself appears. All books he reads, and all he reads assails.

I don't like intellectuals, or, at least, people who call themselves that way, because I am under the impression that there is always something condescending in their demeanour, and I don't like condescending people.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Smatterers in learning are the most opinionated.

In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge; nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation, unless he has never read them.

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

…an aristocratic, arbitrary ass.

Better educated than wealthy

They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.

Such is human nature, in the gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition, and the rotten heart of Daniel Webster.

Not every American belongs to the cognitive elite. Not every American is equipped by nature or nurture to accelerate into a Third Wave Information Age.

There is really no point in exposing equipment and men to the not inconsiderable wear and tear of a three thousand kilometres’ flight, in order to give the rabble of a second-class country like Argentina a chance to insult us.

Few men have ever had a more labor saving contempt for learning.

an intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority.

… his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut

No one, however smart, however well educated … is the suppository of all wisdom.

There's something very funny about giving a menial task to a genius and watching him find so much complexity and overanalyse it to such a degree that the waitress from Nebraska working at the Cheesecake Factory has passed them all by.