Ben Hecht Quotes

At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of [intellectual] sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination

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

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.

Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.

One of the enduring lessons of history is that whenever an empire becomes insular to 'protect' itself, intellectual decline and cultural intolerance are sure to follow.

It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

Many a woman shudders... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians.

A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right. As one grows old, it is easier still.

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.

We are lazier in our minds than in our bodies.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

He was weary of the uncertainty of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when.

Blind belief can be comforting, but it can easily cripple reason and productivity, and stop intellectual progress.

Let me tell you something you haven't learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events - they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn't have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don't even notice at first, and then one day it's there. You wake up and you just don't have the fire anymore." He smiled.

Stale water is a poor drink. Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.