Leslie Stephen Quotes

The same group of New York pseudo-intellectuals who've put down prayer are the same ones who put down L.A.

In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.

Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.

They may be a little more high brow than we are.

Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.

Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore.

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

an intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority.

The art house is an elitist idea.

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

Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

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.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

The educated elite is not without their own actual snobbery. And I kind of an anti-elitist in that regard.

An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.

Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'

The Delhi elite doesn't like me because I'm smarter than them.

If a show is wickedly, hugely popular, like 'Mad Men,' I assume that the masses, in their infinite inferiority to me, don't know what good TV is and that everyone is just brainwashed.

I'm an educated individual.

I thought I was too intellectual to read something like 'Sweet Savage Love.'

Tony Harrison is not on my level.

Just 'cause something's popular, it can still be good. In fact, if more people are buying it, then you must be doing something right. People look down on stuff that sells. What do you call that? Downward snobbery, I guess.

We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.

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.

There is a middlebrow snobbery in America that praises everything on public television and disdains everything on the commercial networks as a blight.