“Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality […] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.”

—  Stephen Jay Gould, book Eight Little Piggies

"Men of the Thirty-Third Division: An Essay on Integrity", p. 136
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death).…" by Stephen Jay Gould?
Stephen Jay Gould photo
Stephen Jay Gould274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

Related quotes

John Kenneth Galbraith photo

“In these matters, as often in our culture, it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section VII, p. 85

Gertrude Stein photo

“The surrealists still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century. Picasso only sees something else, another reality. Complications are always easy but another vision than that of all the world is very rare.”

Gertrude Stein Picasso

Picasso (1938)

James Joyce photo

“The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

To Djuna Barnes, in an interview published in Vanity Fair (March 1922)

“Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

John Zerzan photo

“Division of labor is central to our way of life. Each person must perform as a tiny cog in a big machine. If, on the other hand, your primary goal is wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, and an intact world, then there's quite a lot wrong with it.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“Our children must have, or lack, those things that the children of the ordinary citizen have or lack; our families should understand this and struggle for it to be that way.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Peter Jackson photo

“Kong bites his head off in a PG13 kinda way”

Peter Jackson (1961) New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter

A note in the 1996 script for 'King Kong quoted in USA Today http://www.angelfire.com/ri/KingKong33/mar05.html

“Anti-intellectualism … first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 22-23

Bertolt Brecht photo

“It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

Essays on the Art of Theater (1954).
Context: It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.

Related topics