38 Quotes About Anti-intellectualism

Mindfulness opposes judgment, conceptualization, words, language, reason, logic, knowledge, understanding, science, philosophy, mathematics, history, intellectualism, learning from the past and planning for the future. It reduces thoughtful humans to the state of thoughtless animals, prisoners of the ignorance of the moment, overwhelmed by primitive sense-certainty. And this is sold as a desirable state, something we should all aspire to!

The great rationalist Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” The religious mystic the Buddha said, “I think, therefore I am not.” Why is the Buddha much more popular than Descartes? Because the average person barely thinks at all.

Mindfulness” is the purest mindlessness. It is the great and perverse desire to annihilate consciousness and exist in an eternal now of unthinking perception of nothing at all. It is the most nihilistic vision there has ever been. It is “nirvana” – absolute nothingness, the state of infinite anti-consciousness.

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.

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.

If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.

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.

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.

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.