A Quote by Jesse Ball

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

Jesse Ball

Quote Topics

Anti Banal Genuinely Intellectual Pleasure Profoundly Seeking Which

Quote Author

Jesse Ball
American - Novelist
Born: June 7, 1978

George Bush ran a campaign where he bragged about being an anti-intellectual, dismissing his Harvard and Yale pedigree, pretending he was an American every day, ordinary everyman, and as a result of that, played up his fumbling speech because it signified that he was a good guy. That is deeply and profoundly anti-intellectual.

Michael Eric Dyson

Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

Susan Jacoby

Epicurus recommends bread and cheese as the staple, and his emphasis is more on avoiding pain than on seeking pleasure, insofar as pleasure-seeking tends to be followed by painful after-effects.

Catherine Wilson

Richard Hofstadter, in his famous book which was written in the time of the McCarthy period in the 1950 and 1960s, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, talks about the deep hatred that some Americans had for what they consider to be elitist intellectual activity. I think that's what's happening now.

Joan Wallach Scott

Over the years, my marks on paper have landed me in all sorts of courts and controversies - I have been comprehensively labelled; anti-this and anti-that, anti-social, anti-football, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-science, anti-republican, anti-American, anti-Australian - to recall just an armful of the antis.

Michael Leunig

Love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty.

Pope Benedict XVI

All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself. All the happiness in the world comes from seeking pleasure for others.

Shantideva

At the heart of our desires is eternal happiness without the slightest hint of misery. You could say that we are pleasure seekers; however, seeking pleasure from the objects of our five senses produces fleeting moments of pleasure whereas, pleasure of one's self, a soul, is eternal and ever-increasing pleasure.

Terry Cole-Whittaker

I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life].

Cornel West

A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be - with the right vocal cords - brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.

Jonathan Miles

A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God's gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished-not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed. A new age in which love is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty. A new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption that deaden our souls and poison our relationships.

Pope Benedict XVI

There is at present in the United States a powerful activist movement that is anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-technology. If we are to have faith that mankind will survive and thrive on the face of the Earth, we must depend on the continued revolutions brought about by science.