Anti Intellectualism Quotes

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. 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.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.”
― Phil Plait

“To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense, the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule.”
― Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

“There is a great superficiality in today's evangelical world. Many Bible-believing Christians share the contemporary case for self-gratification, emotionalism, and anti-intellectualism. Many people who believe in the Bible have never read it.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Loving God with All Your Mind: Thinking as a Christian in the Postmodern World

“The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.”
― Naomi Klein

“Listen, I’m not an intellectual—Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces—of history.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“Anti-intellectualism is one of the greatest problems in the world today.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“The cosmos stands amazed at just how dumb Planet Dumb is. With an uncanny talent for error, humanity has at every crossroads taken the wrong path. Humanity is the species guaranteed to choose wrongly. What else would you expect in a Dunning-Kruger world? Ignorance reigns supreme. Everyone is part of the Dumbageddon Conspiracy.”
― Ranty McRanterson, Full Retard: The Dumbest Just Got Dumber

“Having the data is not the same as having the expertise to look through the data - if it were, everybody with a smartphone would be a doctor or a scientist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“Let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Facts and Belief (The Sonnet)

No belief is worth losing your humanity over,
No intellect is worth losing your kindness over.
Facts, faith, reason, religion all come later,
First and foremost we must humanize our behavior.
If a belief or intellect makes you a better person,
More power to your belief or intellect I say.
But if they become a hindrance to your humanity,
Throw it immediately like poison far, far away.
Beliefs have cast shadows of wars throughout history,
Facts have provided weapons for those wars.
Then again beliefs have taught us to love our neighbor,
Facts have helped us fight calamity and disorders.
Let all beliefs and facts be guided by a warm heart.
Warmth alone will make our world fit for human birth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“Where men are heated by zeal and enthusiasm, there is no degree of human testimony so strong as may not be procured for the greatest absurdity.

- Of Miracles”
― David Hume, The Age of Enlightenment: An anthology of eighteenth-century texts: Volume 1

“As long as the acquisition of knowledge is rendered habitually repugnant, so long will there be a prevailing tendency to discontinue it when free from the coercion of parents and masters.”
― Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical

“You could take seriously a president that quoted T. S. Eliot. But none do, and none ever would. No president would ever dare to say anything intelligent. There would be a revolution on the spot. The rednecks’ heads would explode. America would implode. God forbid that a president should ever say a single clever thing. All that the president is allowed to say is, “God bless America. One nation under God.” … the mantra of morons. Imagine a different America where the president said, “I think, therefore I am. … The unexamined life is not worth living. … God is dead.”
― David Sinclair, Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes: Individualism Versus Collectivism

“If you are able to learn with reason at hand and warmth in heart then you'll start to see the foulness of the primitive fantasies, such as nationalism, fundamentalism, elitism, intellectualism, anti-intellectualism and so on.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism

“The idea that objectivity is best reached only through rational thought is a specifically Western and masculine way of thinking--one that we will challenge throughout the book.”
― Margaret L. Andersen, Race, Class, & Gender: An Anthology

“Shred all chains to dust my friend, and advance as actual liberated beings, liberated not just from the primitive hogwash of magic and mysticism, but also from the modern hogwash of intellectual condescension.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“Celebrities and influencers are not health experts, stop taking medical advice from halfwits of wellness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“Stop being a two-bit doctor from ten minutes of googling.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“There is no danger greater for the State than that of self-styled intellectuals. You would have been better off remaining illiterate.

- King Hassan II of Morocco, quoted in the Preface”
― Marilyn Hacker, Tales of a Severed Head

“Parents and schools are teaching children how not to think, but how to be good little groupthinkers and people of faith, how to be liberal, multicultural, and politically correct. The idea of quality, excellence, glory, is anathema. It’s the love that dare not speak its name. The exceptional make the mediocre feel bad about themselves, so the mediocre use their force of numbers to demonize the exceptional. The mediocre cannot and will not be made to feel inadequate. Instead of making themselves adequate – God forbid! – they kill the exceptional and then no one notices their inadequacy. Hallelujah! Job done. Amen, Namaste, Brother!”
― David Sinclair, Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes: Individualism Versus Collectivism

“After the First World War, the man in charge of recruitment at the Colonial Office was Major Ralph Dolignon Furse, a decorated war hero, a keen rugby and cricket player and, crucially, holder of a poor third-class degree from Oxford. Furse's selection process was designed to eliminate anyone too smart: dependability was the thing most desired. The last thing anyone wanted was for men in the field to analyse what they were doing.”
― Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain

“Sonnet 1106

When an expert doesn't know something,
They say, "I don't know", without tricks.
But an armchair intellectual knows it all,
Tiktok and Insta are their clinics.

An expert's worth remains the same,
with or without Tiktok and Insta.
Armchair intellectuals are here today gone tomorrow,
with the tiniest algorithm change of social media.

My work will continue,
with or without social media.
My work will continue,
with or without internet.
My work will continue,
with or without electricity even,
so will the work of every expert sapiens.

Instant popularity vanishes just as instantly,
Today you are relevant, tomorrow you are gone.
Make a real contribution that isn't overshadowed
by the next big tech revolution.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Man Whom the Trees Loved

“In the life of many churches, the habits of anti-intellectualism are planted early. Children are encouraged to open themselves up to the influence of God, and once they do so, they are told with great specificity what God's will is. When they are young, they often don't realize that what is represented as God's will is really just the views and preferences of those in charge. Adherents may be encouraged to surrender not just their will, but also their independence of thought. They may use their intellect, but only within the narrow structures set up by the rules and teachings of the leaders.”
― Jon Ward, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation