Tom Waits Quotes

To enter upon rulership of a country but not preserve its scholars will result in the downfall of the country.

A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.

Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads.

Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges ... discussion often leaves off where it should begin.

Learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself

It's this patronizing thing that people have about if you're against the war, everyone's lumped together. You know, the soldiers are not scholars; they're not war experts.

Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science.

All the learn'd are cowards by profession.

That intellectuals, including academics, would become a "new class" of technocrats, claiming the name of science while cooperating with the powerful, was predicted by [Mikhail] Bakunin in the early days of the formation of the modern intelligentsia in the 19th century.

If your ideas are bigger than the town you're in, you've got to get out of there.

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew.

Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked.

You can't be an actor in a small town-you have to go to New York or L.A.

My town was even smaller. Only six hundred people. We didn't have a grocery store.

I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.

I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.

Intellectuals (in the standard sense of the term, not [ Edward] Said's prescriptive sense) are the people who write history.

I have learned more from Hayek than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski - but not even excepting Russell.

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

I've always been an avid reader. Everyone in my family read a lot. Considering we were from a little town, we were pretty literate.

I come from a small town in Maryland. I came to California in 1972 to begin Maude.