Donald Johanson Quotes

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations - Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them - even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

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

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.

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

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

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.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

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

We need a serious intellectual culture in schools.

What could be wiser and to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that's powerful.

I just love to read, learn, and think through complex things.

In fact the experience at Oxford has really helped me later in life.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

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.

I'm not looking to be a trophy. When not acting, I spend my time studying metaphysics and quantum mechanics to keep my life as grounded as I can.

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.

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.