William Hazlitt Quotes

I think it's easy to make impenetrable music that nobody can get, and you can hide behind that sometimes.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

In truth, I don't care about making feminism more accessible to anyone.

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.

I'm like a menu at an expensive restaurant; you can look at me, but you can't afford me.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

'Elitist' doesn't need to mean wealthy and conservative; it can also mean specialised and rarefied, and that's no bad thing.

I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too 'high art' - if you're not in the club, they're not going to let you join. It's like The Turin Shroud: don't touch it because it might fall apart.

Philosophy is for the few.

I just don't like big guys who speak cryptically and act like they understand the language better than me.

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

Golf is elitist, it's stuffy, it's exclusive and I hate that because I am not that and I was never welcomed in and I'm still not welcomed in.

I really like Adam Curtis' 'Century of Self.' It's about how artists have failed the general public by being so exclusive, like being in an echo chamber. I was definitely more like that in my early twenties - my music was completely inaccessible.

When you're not as accessible, you get in a tent and get in your own head, and you start doing things that are a little out of touch. I think we've seen it happen with certain artists... people can't touch them; they're not touching people. They're only touching people in their circle.

One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something.

More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

I'm not going into the cool club. It's not my address.

I remembered a time when my grandmother had asked me to explain television to her - the guts, not the funny pictures. There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man's opinion is as good as another's. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is - and doesn't forgive ignorance.

The more closed the circle, the more difficult it is for 'outsiders' to break in. Their very difficulty in entering may be taken as a sign of incompetence, a sign that the insiders were right to close their ranks.

There are some people, who I'll charitably call snobs, who are dismissive of any conversation that doesn't begin with the full level of complexity. That's just not how the world works.

Politics is a thing that only the unsophisticated can really go for.