Peter Greenaway Quotes

I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!

There's the anti-intellectual movement in society and I don't blame them entirely for feeling that way because we all know people, I have many colleagues where you try to hang out with them and they make you feel bad for not knowing what they know. If that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

To break boundaries interests me. With all the knowledge that is available now in the world, it should be accessible to everyone. You can get so much information on the Internet now, and yet there are so many places in the world where people just don't have the education.

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

When the National Theatre was built, it was a public building. If you wander round that building now, there are bits hived off for people who pay more money. That's happening across the arts.

The art house is an elitist idea.

I don't want to be an elitist designer. It's no fun just catering for a small group of people. It's against my principles.

If anybody gets highbrow around the studio, out he goes.

Philistine - a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.

My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

Be egalitarian regarding persons. Be elitist regarding ideas.

Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot's poetry or Kant's logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently.

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

Learning, to be of much use, must have a tendency to spread itself among the common people.

I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use "elite" to mean "person who has taken the time to know" and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing.

My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard."

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

The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.

Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

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