Andrew Breitbart Quotes

I mean, when I got to Brown, the place was riven, because you had older professors who were basically new critics and had been teaching a certain way for 30 years. And then you had this other gang who was down with the semiotic program. And as a student, you were, in a way, forced to choose which cohort you were going with.

For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves.

One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Every intellectual attitude is latently political.

Ron Paul is very smart, so I don't want to talk to him too long for fear that he will convince me.

We need a serious intellectual culture in schools.

The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.

I'm totally open to changing my beliefs. I could grow up to be a total communist. I could grow up to be a Neocon. I'm looking to have my views challenged. I'm looking to be corrected.

I don't want any of my sisters to be like Tomi Lahren. You all are smarter, sharper, more articulate, brilliant, so why would I want y'all to be like her?

Some people spend their time reasoning and thinking out everything, and so anything that cannot be fully understood, they will not accept. We call these people 'intellectuals.'

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, facts matter.

If you start thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on the left because that provides a systematic solution and answer to the questions and puts it all in a system and also gives you a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system. But once you started thinking, if you think about harder and longer about it, you’ll move back to what you would have been if you’d never thought at all.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

If you're also in the arena and you're putting your ideas out and you're owning them and you're saying "I disagree with you about this and that, I think you've got this wrong" - then not only do I invite that, I freaking love that. I love that. I'm an academic. I'm hardwired for a good debate.

Chess is an effective means to educate and train the human intellect.

I hate set dissertations,--and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.