Slick Rick Quotes

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

Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity.

I think Britain is a little better at bringing intellectuals into discourse than America, where I'm from. Though I would say, perhaps, that the U.K. prefers its intellectualism to be entertaining.

There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

Country and western is ignored by the intellectuals. They don't look at it as an art form. They think it's just somebody sitting on his couch singing about his life.

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

Look, people have an image of Italians. When I go somewhere in the world, I don't care where it is, when they look at me it's not about my intelligence. It's who can I beat up.

They seem to be charmed by my Southern accent.

Come on, I'm from Iceland; I don't do hip-hop.

The problem is that rap is so often a caricature of its own image. Nobody comes to the table with the seriousness of the effect that it can have; nobody is prepared for that.

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

I always hear, 'Oh, she's really beautiful.' I'd die to hear, 'Oh, she's really smart.' I'm not as dumb as I look.

This has become a bugbear of mine: the difference between geek and nerd.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

You can't argue that hip-hop rots away the moral character of kids or rots their brain and still see middle-class white kids going to college who are listening to hip-hop. Going on to become healthy adults listening to hip-hop.

I don't buy into this idea that pop has to be frivolous or vacuous, and we've never subscribed to that.

People around the NBA really think that I'm dumb or stupid. But people that know me know that I'm actually very intelligent.

Being the smartest person in the room I think can be very lonely.

I never used to be taken seriously as a Swiss person.

If you take an Oriental person and spin him around several times, does he become disoriented?

It is a hard thing for intellectuals to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it.

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?