Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

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.

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

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

I think it's become fashionable for the snobbish egghead today to make fun of television. I've heard many people, boast, "I would never have a television set in my house," well, these people are fools.

What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

Most people are not intellectuals — a fact that intellectuals have terrible trouble coming to terms with.

… when we know a thing we have only scorn for other people who don’t happen to know it.

It makes me sad there is still some intellectual snobbery out there.

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

There are some people, who I'll charitably call snobs, who are dismissive of any conversation that doesn't begin with the full level of complexity. That's just not how the world works.

As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.

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.

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

Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.

For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own.

Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth

I don't listen to people who can't do stuff that I do.

I lived in a town called New Canaan, which is just outside of Connecticut, where they are far too snobby to even mention celebrities. Many American towns are famous for things like, "See the World's Largest Ball of String!" I think my town's would probably have to be "Most Pretentious People".

People need to understand. If they go to a show on Broadway and find seventy people working but only fifty spectators, how much would the ticket cost? That's what El Bulli's about. There are seventy actors who are playing for just fifty spectators. Is the price expensive? It's relative. How much does a normal dinner at a five-star hotel restaurant cost? Four hundred dollars. It's the same as El Bulli. But you can also think of it this way: How much would it cost to eat something that nobody else is eating?

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.

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.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.