anti-intellectual Quotes

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.

I'm a meathead, man. You've got smart people, and you've got dumb people. I just happen to be dumb.

One of the categories of people I don't like much are intellectuals. People say, 'Oh, you're an intellectual,' and I say, 'No!' What is an intellectual? An intellectual is somebody who thinks ideas are more important than people.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

I hate academic mysteries. As soon as I come across the word 'don' and it's not someone's first name, I close the book.

If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe...they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect.

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up.

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?

There is at present in the United States a powerful activist movement that is anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-technology. If we are to have faith that mankind will survive and thrive on the face of the Earth, we must depend on the continued revolutions brought about by science.

I'm not cerebral in any way. Education, for me, was a nightmare. You put someone talking in front of me, and I cannot engage with that. I think that's why I'm an actor; if I can physically be in it, I get it.

That's the funny thing about cinema, it is an intellectual medium, but it's also sort of anti-intellectual.

I'm probably the least cerebral guy you're ever going to meet as a writer.

I'm not that smart, and I don't read things.

Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.

Philistine - a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.