“To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.”
“We should take care not to make the intellect our god: it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.”
“Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.”
“A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.”
“The role of the intelligence --that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.”
“Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.”
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
“Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.”
“I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.”
“The difference between a smart man and a wise man is that a smart man knows what to say, a wise man knows whether or not to say it.”
“It is the mind that makes the body rich; and as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, so honor peereth in the meanest habit.''”
“The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.”
“People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.”
“Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
“The level of the development of a country is determined, in considerable part, by the level of development of its people's intelligence.”
“To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word ''Intellectual'' suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.”
“Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.”
“Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.”
“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.''”
“Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.”
“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”
“If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.”
“Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.”
“The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.”
“Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.”
“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
“The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.”
“The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true.”
“Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.”
“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”