Pedants Quotes & Sayings

Robespierre, this pedant of freedom! — Franz Grillparzer

He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. — Stefan Zweig

There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgments as anger. No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal upon the account of his own choler; why then should fathers and pedants be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger? It is then no longer correction bat revenge. Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and should we suffer a physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient? — Michel De Montaigne

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They're too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer's less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they're guardians of language. They're no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. — Stephen Fry

The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians
and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. — H.L. Mencken

We see that pedantry has never been held in such esteem for the government of the world as in our times, and it offers as many paths of the true intelligible species and objects of infallible and sole truth as there are individual pedants. — Giordano Bruno

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit. — Ludwig Von Mises

He who comes from the kitchen, smells of its smoke; and he who adheres to a sect, has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student; and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant. — William Hazlitt

History and war are cruel pedants. Those who know too little of the former are likely to have too much of the latter. — Oliver North

The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic. — Lord Chesterfield

Yes. You do understand, you do. I knew you would. It was that analogy you made to the Quran that got me thinking in the first place. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction. The stag and the doe and the trap. Instead of working with linear strings of ones and zeroes, the computer could work with bundles that were one and zero and every point in between, all at once. If, if, if you could teach it to overcome its binary nature."
"That sounds very complicated indeed."
"It should be impossible, but it isn't." Alif began typing furiously. "All modern computers are pedants. To them the world is divided into black and white, off and on, right and wrong. But I will teach yours to recognize multiple origin points, interrelated geneses, systems of multivalent cause and effect. — G. Willow Wilson

Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American-Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common
and enough that separated them from everyone else
that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately. — Andrew Roberts

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves ... — Peter Drucker

Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion
a form of knowledge without the power of it. — Joseph Addison

Education jargon is the language of pedants; it identifies those who have so little confidence in themselves and their work that they seek to create a veil of words to hide them. — Ted Sizer

When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely:
1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws
2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues
3. Admire themselves for living up to it
Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on. — John R. Perry

There is a sort of knowledge beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had in conversation; so necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers the true practical system can be learned only in the world. — Henry Fielding

Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connoisseur appreciates only individual works. — Franz Grillparzer

He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant. — Jean De La Bruyere

Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine? — Giordano Bruno

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants. — H.L. Mencken

God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers, who try to teach God his job as Creator. — Elie Faure

This 'fecundity of will,' this thirst for action, when accompanied by poverty of feeling and intellect incapable of creation, will produce nothing but a Napoleon I or a Bismarck, wiseacres who try to force the world to progress backwards. While on the other hand, mental fertility destitute of well developed sensibility will bring forth such barren fruits as literary and scientific pedants who only hinder the advance of knowledge. Finally, sensibility unguided by large intelligence will produce such persons as the woman ready to sacrifice everything for some brute of a man, upon whom she pours forth all her love.
If life is to be fruitful, it must be so at once in intelligence, in feeling and in will. This fertility in every direction is life; the only thing worthy the name. — Pyotr Kropotkin

I am a book-collector, a proud avocationist in what Eric Quayle (wrongly) asserts to be the "least vicious" of hobbies (we are quite savage). We collectors are puzzled and often piqued unpleasantly by the common, absurd notion whereby we are only a pack of myopic, semi-crazed old pedants fretting over a book's colophon, dull dogs full of humorless zeal and no conversation, who suck our fingers free of pounce. — Paul Theroux

Throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books. — James K. Morrow

A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort. — Thomas Carlyle

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity. — Wilkie Collins

Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance. — Vladimir Nabokov

In England, wit is at least a profession, if not an art. everything becomes professional there, and even the rogues of that islandare pedants. So are the "wits" there too. They introduce into reality absolute freedom whose reflection lends a romantic and piquant air to wit, and thus they live wittily; hence their talent for madness. They die for their principles. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant. — Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning. — Charles Caleb Colton

It's my belief that all of the greatest tales ever told have been told in saloons. It was in such smoky, heathen-filled den of iniquity that I first heard the tale of the Bone Feud. As with all great tales, it was at its core one hundred percent true. In fact, much of it has long been a matter of historical record. But tales grow in the telling, and I therefore must apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, and beg your indulgence for any romanticized embellishments. I have decided to present the story here, just as it was told to me. I find it entirely too rich and too entertaining to alter, simply to curry favor with pedants and historians. — Wynne McLaughlin

O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation — Jeremy Bentham

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants. — Jonathan Swift

Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant. — Lois McMaster Bujold

They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne'er-do-weels, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of — W.E.B. Du Bois

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature then we the pedant. — Confucius

Pedants make a great rout about criticism, as if it were a science of great depth, and required much pains and knowledge
criticism however is only the result of good sense, taste and judgment
three qualities that indeed seldom are found together, and extremely seldom in a pedant, which most critics are. — Horace Walpole

All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted. — Samuel Johnson

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. — Steven Pinker

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. — Miguel De Unamuno

Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind. — Wilfrid

Silence is a trick when it imposes. Pedants and scholars, churchmen and physicians, abound in silent pride. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality [ ... ] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches. — Stephen Jay Gould

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality. — Eric Hoffer

My fellow critics and I may occasionally fault a movie for departing, in detail or in spirit, from its literary source, but the grousing of a few adult pedants is nothing compared to the wrath of several million bookish 10-year-olds. Their presumed demands, and the hovering spirit of Harry's creator, J. K. Rowling, inhibit this movie as it did the first Potter film. — A.O. Scott

The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant. — Sir Fulke Greville

The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we musn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise. — Ray Bradbury

The nudes of art are not so distant from pornography as prudish pedants pretend. — Mason Cooley

Autocorrect: making Twitter pedants delete and re-tweet since 2007. — Cassandra Page

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination. — Alfred North Whitehead

The search for truth in cyberspace will take you through the wormhole, and there's nothing on the other side but pedants and nitpickers and bottomless ambiguity. If you're not careful, you'll spend all your time proving everything and understanding nothing. — Mike Rowe

A fool is only troublesome, a pedant insupportable. — Napoleon Bonaparte