Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round. — Vladimir Nabokov Copy Share Image
A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines — Vladimir Lenin Copy Share Image
He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep. — Louis Kronenberger Copy Share Image
Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society. — V. S. Naipaul Copy Share Image
A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored. — Karl Kraus Copy Share Image
The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men. — Georg Brandes Copy Share Image
I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of… — Quentin Crisp Copy Share Image
What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns… — Hunter S. Thompson Copy Share Image
I'm quite squeamish, really. I'm philistine and unsophisticated - not because of my great discerning palate but other reasons. Some are moral… — Ricky Gervais Copy Share Image
Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don't understand you? It's because you are the answer to Samson's riddle. You are… — Thomas Harris Copy Share Image
To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of… — Maxim Gorky Copy Share Image
Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both… — Louis Kronenberger Copy Share Image
There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional… — Anton Chekhov Copy Share Image
It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and… — Germaine Greer Copy Share Image
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between… — Orson Welles Copy Share Image
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom,… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the… — Allan Bloom Copy Share Image
Next to the defeated politician, the writer is the most vocal and inventive griper on earth. He sees hardship and unfairness wherever… — Peter Mayle Copy Share Image
I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself… — Ernst Junger Copy Share Image
The costs of an ignorance of science are nor just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures, and a unilateral disarmament in… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has… — Richard M. Weaver Copy Share Image
Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of… — William O. Douglas Copy Share Image
A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the… — Vladimir Nabokov Copy Share Image
“The suicide committed by Sampson was partly determined by the craftiness of Delilah and partly decided by the disobedience of Sampson. Satan… — Israelmore Ayivor Copy Share Image
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen… — Matthew Arnold Copy Share Image
With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes… — Leon Trotsky Copy Share Image
When temptation comes your way, name that boastful, deceitful giant “Goliath!” and do with it as David did to the Philistine of… — Gordon B. Hinckley Copy Share Image
A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in… — Arthur Schopenhauer Copy Share Image
PHILISTINE, n. One whose mind is the creature of its environment, following the fashion in thought, feeling and sentiment. He is sometimes… — Ambrose Bierce Copy Share Image
“Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles,… — Helon Habila Copy Share Image
Why can't the black man have a God? What's so wrong when a black man says his God will protect him form… — Malcolm X Copy Share Image
A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense… — Arthur Schopenhauer Copy Share Image
Philistine - a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined,… — Leslie Stephen Copy Share Image
England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines. — Hanif Kureishi Copy Share Image
If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but… — Lionel Trilling Copy Share Image
It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit.… — Felicity Huffman Copy Share Image
