A Quote by Noam Chomsky

This is a large part of the academic profession: to make up complex, subtle arguments that are childishly ridiculous but are enveloped in sufficient profundity that they take on a kind of plausibility.

Noam Chomsky

Quote Topics

Academic Complex Kind Large Large Part Make Make Up Part Profession Profundity Ridiculous Subtle Sufficient Take Up

Quote Author

Noam Chomsky
American - Activist
Born: December 7, 1928

What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle but, unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient.

Tony Kushner

When a profession is protected by academic freedom and tenure, it tends to turn inward. To a large extent that's good.

Martha C. Nussbaum

Because of mathematics precise, formal character, mathematical arguments remain sound even when they are long and complex. In contast, common sense arguments can generally be trusted only if they remain short; even moderately long nonmathematical arguments rapidly becomes farfetched an dubious.

Jacob T. Schwartz

Few look for truth; many prowl about for a reputation of profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are the best.

Rene Descartes

Selfless giving is like putting on make-up. We're covering up a part of ourselves thats not very aware. The thing is when we take the make up off, the selflish part leaves us. We are freeer, clearer.

Frederick Lenz

Make-up is an integral part of my lifestyle because of the profession I'm in.

Kirti Kulhari

Complexity and profundity have been equated by the academic culture just as fame and significance have been conflated by the popular culture. Fame and significance have nothing to do with one another; and complexity and profundity have nothing to do with one another.

Dennis Prager

The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.

Jules Renard

I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

William H. Gass

The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy. Take common sense quantum sufficit; add a little application to the rules and orders of the House [of Commons], throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness and elegancy of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind neither analyze nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface.

Lord Chesterfield

It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.

John le Carre

When the opportunity came up to do social justice work for the New School in an academic setting, and still be able to support the mayor and be part of the de Blasio family, it was kind of a no-brainer for me.

Maya Wiley

The Trump phenomenon is in large part a reaction of Middle America to attacks on its values by intellectual and academic communities. There are other reasons, but this is a significant one.

Henry Kissinger

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

George Saunders

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.