Intellectual Inequality Quotes

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

The public is too damned dumb to understand.

I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.

It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture- race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.

Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.

It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a problem, to solve it and then to apply it. The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Stupid people are ruining America.

… when we know a thing we have only scorn for other people who don’t happen to know it.

There is a sect in this country, which extends its influence, more or less, into all the ramifications of society, that explodes all kinds of knowledge not founded on personal experience; which inculcates that ignorance is the summum bonum; that the less one reads the more one thinks, and that the less he understands, the better he can act; that education beyond the precincts of common schools is allied to aristocracy, and incompatible with natural equality

You can't hang around geniuses forever because they end up taking everything you've got. That's why they're the genius and you're not.

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

The little Napoleons in UMNO try to keep out people who are more intelligent than themselves.

We [Germans] are morally and intellectually superior to all men.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

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.

From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.

This illusion that a lower class has less intelligence than a higher class is a complete fake-out.

That's really my main message: everyone is stupid, and no one is more stupid than the rest.

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.

And why does England thus persecute the votaries of her science? Why does she depress them to the level of her hewers of wood and her drawers of water? Is it because science flatters no courtier, mingles in no political strife? ... Can we behold unmoved the science of England, the vital principle of her arts, struggling for existence, the meek and unarmed victim of political strife?

There's something very funny about giving a menial task to a genius and watching him find so much complexity and overanalyse it to such a degree that the waitress from Nebraska working at the Cheesecake Factory has passed them all by.

I don't see myself in an ivory tower.

Today millions of people are living who will never do it again. Millions are being born for the first time - and millions are doing nothing because it's the best offer they've had this week. It is for these people and many others that the Surprise Party is conceived and desecrated, founded upon the principle that everybody is just as good as anybody else, even though they aren't quite so smart.