Ernest Andre Gellner Quotes

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.

I don't like answering to other people's philosophies. I don't have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don't. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There's nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I'm linked with a movement, it pisses me off.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Now many such things may be done without intitling the people to rise in arms. A gross, flagrant, and palpable abuse no doubt will do it, as if they should be required to pay a tax equal to half or third of their substance.

When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, "And I sentenced them to stay at home."

Fight Club is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy - the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

I don't really have a life philosophy; my thing is just rebelling against pretty much organized religion. That is my main thing, because personally I think it's a crutch for people that are too weak to get through life on their own. I'm the kind of guy that says if I don't see it, then it doesn't work. And nobody can show me God.

A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.

And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.

The pretention that some of us are better than others, I don't think is a very good thing. And who is contributing what to our progress in science is not so obvious and many who don't get that Nobel Prize are better than people... than some of us that do get the Nobel Prize. I think we should not be interested in prizes, we should be interested in learning about nature.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.

Is it really so terrible being around us?" I blushed. "No," I said. "But . . . it's complicated. I've been taught certain things my entire life. Those are hard to shake." "The greatest changes in history have come because people were able to shake off what others told them to do.

People will tell me, "You're such a punk rebel," this or that, but I was not that growing up. I was actually a super-sheltered, conservative girl. Now, there was probably a bit of me that was like, "Why do I have to be like that?"

When people begin to lose hope, there's bound to be explosions.

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

The philosopher stands at his desk in the lecture hall, and demonstrates away the soul of man, and with exact thought measures out his atoms and resolves him back to gas and air. But the revolutionary, below in the crowd, hears, and only translates what he hears thus to his brethren: 'Let us drink while we may; property is robbery; this life is all; let us kill and eat; there is no God.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com.

It's not my concern. It's your concern. I just keep working. I keep posing certain questions and I think there are times when people think "What happened to the Judith Butler I used to know?" or "She's not doing gender trouble. Does that mean she refuses it or she's disavowed it?" And I would say no. I have not refused or disavowed anything.

The next time anyone asks you "What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?" the correct answer is "What year, please?"

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

People talk to me a lot about, "Why don't you ever rebel?" And I feel like I do rebel. To me, rebelling is - is that rush you get when you sing a song about someone and you know they're in the crowd.