Craig Ferguson Quotes

I was very intellectually oriented, very early on.

It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

I never thought that I was very intelligent.

Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of - the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.

Intellectuals are people who manage the world in their head. They look at life and try to see some kind of truth, and if they cannot find it, they attempt to create it.

I don't like the intellectual label.

I grew up in this house of intellectuals, and for me, it wasn't, like, a negative thing. And what I've discovered is, for a lot of people, it is. But I think knowing history, liking to talk about ideas - like, I just genuinely like to geek out and go on these intellectual thought journeys.

I'm quite intellectual. I read a lot and I'm very politically aware.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

I love hearing people who are smarter than me talk about my comics. It makes me feel smarter.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I don't consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

A Socrates in every classroom.

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life.

To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.