Why don’t they pass a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as Prohibition did, in five years we will have the smartest people on earth.
Will Rogers
Whales have been evolving for thirty million years. To our one million. A sperm whale’s brain is seven times the size of mine… The great size of his body has little to do with the great size of his brain, other than as a place to keep it. I have What If fantasies… What if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale? … Some species go for months without eating anything. Just completely idle.. So they have this incredible mental apparatus and no one has the least notion what they do with it. Lilly says that the most logical supposition, based on physiological and ecological evidence, is that they contemplate the universe… Suppose God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’d figure it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?
Cormac McCarthy, Of Whales and Men (via delicada)

(via mrtumblerman)

Source: delicada

The venn diagram of boys who don’t like smart girls and boys you don’t want to date…is a circle.
John Green
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.
Woodrow Wilson
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’.
Isaac Asimov (via azspot)

(via azspot)

Source: joelhousman.com

‘Controversial,’ as we all know, is often a euphemism for ‘interesting and intelligent.’
Kevin Smith (via writingquotes)

Source: writingquotes

I’ve met very few dumb gay guys. It takes some intelligence and insight to figure out you’re gay and then a tremendous amount of balls to live it and live it proudly.
Jason Bateman 
If you are dumb surround yourself with smart people and if you are smart surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.
Robert Guillaume, Sports Night
Years ago my mother used to say to me, ‘In this world, you must be oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.
James Stewart, Harvey
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (via psychotherapy)

Source: psychotherapy

Put a lot of information out there. People can handle it. It’s okay to use big words. You don’t need to dumb stuff down! You don’t need to make stuff simple and repetitive for people. If you assume that your audience is as interested in what you are talking about as you are, you’re going to connect with your audience in a much better way.
Rachel Maddow, New York Magazine: The Secret to Rachel Maddow’s Success (via apsies)

Source: apsies