Nonintellectual Quotes & Sayings

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folk-ishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. Tailor — Milton Sanford Mayer

A heckler once interrupted Nikita Khrushchev in the middle of a speech in which he was denouncing the crimes of Stalin. "You were a colleague of Stalin's," the heckler yelled, "why didn't you stop him then?" Khrushschev apparently could not see the heckler and barked out, "Who said that?" No hand went up. No one moved a muscle. After a few seconds of tense silence, Khrushchev finally said in a quiet voice, "Now you know why I didn't stop him." Instead of just arguing that anyone facing Stalin was afraid, knowing that the slightest sign of rebellion would mean certain death, he had made them feel what it was like to face Stalin - had made them feel the paranoia, the fear of speaking up, the terror of confronting the leader, in this case Khrushchev. The demonstration was visceral and no more argument was necessary. — Robert Greene

I still have a very nonintellectual, nonjudgmental relationship with melody and the music as I hear it all in my head. — Ariel Pink

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character. In the next chapter I shall discuss the complex and little known laws of variation and of correlation of growth. In the four succeeding chapters, the most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory will be given: namely, first, the difficulties of transitions, or in understanding how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or elaborately constructed organ; secondly the subject of Instinct, or the mental powers of animals, thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the imperfection of the Geological Record. In — Charles Darwin

I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll. — John C. Reilly

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets. — Roger Ebert

We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of "easy listening". — Stephen Jay Gould

Randy Newman and I grew up together in Los Angeles. We are both products of the film studio era. Randy is one of the great songwriters of our time and one of the fun people to be with. — Leonard Slatkin

God, I am hurt, and my mind is wounded, and it needs to be healed by forgetting the offense. I give thee permission to heal my mind so that I no longer remember the incident. Help me to see this person as you see him. Help me only consider his positive traits. Help me to see him as you see him. — Kirk Wilkinson

I think there have been a lot of writers who've been experimenting lately with really sprawling novels that will deal with a number of different characters and different points on the globe. I understand that as a method of getting at the global culture that we live in, and I understand writers who want to maybe juxtapose very different historical periods to make some larger points about how things have changed over time. I tend to like the sort of idea of the novel as a little village, and the novel as a microcosm, a smaller world standing in for a larger one. — Tom Perrotta

never say amen in church if they're
capping off a prayer about you. — Exene Cervenka

I read a story years ago that claimed to be about the most insignificant person ever born. His mother wrote his name on the birth certificate as Nosmo King. Somebody asked the mother where she got a name like that. It turned out the mother was illiterate, so she just copied down the No Smoking sign in the room and wrote it "Nosmo King." There is the ultimate nothing person, named after a No Smoking sign. If you speak the hard gospel of Jesus Christ, you may be pegged as one of the Nosmo Kings of the world: a loser, a nobody. Verse 28 of 1 Corinthians 1 says God has chosen things that are "despised," exoutheneo, considered nothing. Christians are about as low as you can go. We are "the things which are not," literally "the nonexistent ones." It's human nature to want to be somebody. So the Lord decided to do it a different way, choosing as His messengers the impotent, nonintellectual nobodies whom the world considers nothing by its standards. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

You always think another time would have been ideal for you ... the reality is there was no novocaine when you went to the dentist. — Woody Allen

I was kind of an innocent hayseed from a middle-class, utterly nonintellectual background. — Julia Child

I ... confirm the fact - with a certain bittersweet melancholy - that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book. — Jorge Luis Borges

Every rule has an exception, and it's usually remedial — Josh Stern

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people. — George Takei

Teamwork is not a preference, it is a requirement. — John Wooden

Women are really demanding more flexibility in the workplace. Control is the new currency.. Forty-six percent of women want to start their own small businesses. — Celinda Lake