Wynton Marsalis Quotes

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant.

Our culture will become like it was during the medieval times when there truly was a cultural elite. The rest of the people will just watch television, which will be their only frame of reference.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?

The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race without end... What mattered more than the answers were the questions... For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future... I had turned my anxiety into my profession.

The original Greek word "idiotes" referred to people who might have had a high IQ, but were so self-involved that they focused exclusively on their own life and were both ignorant of and uncaring about public concerns and the common good.

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.

Obstinate people can be divided into the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish.

Where people really base their principles has nothing to do with the color of someone's skin, it has to do with money and their class.

The people in Hollywood are fabulously stupid.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

Be straight with yourself just to maybe save a few more people from being stupid and being ignorant.

The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.

Hateful, racist and ignorant remarks. When I hear people criticize without knowing the context, it makes me boil inside.

I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don't have any real knowledge.

It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.

Only those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.

No one is saying you're possessed by the devil anymore except the most ignorant of people in modern culture.

Under the freest constitution ignorant people are still slaves.