Variant: Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.
“You know, Gilan, sarcasm isn't the lowest form of wit. It's not even wit at all.”
“You know, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.'
'And yet it is still extremely funny.”
Source: The Time of My Life
“Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.”
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Context: Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage—the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
“A patent is a legal analog of sticky fly paper: it attracts some of the lowest forms of life.”
in his autobiography, as quoted by [Peter Louis Galison, Bruce William Hevly, Big science: the growth of large-scale research, Stanford University Press, 1992, 0804718792, 55]
Michael Kennedy The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (1980) p. 593.
Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 5, Unstable America, p. 189
After visiting the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Germany, as quoted in The New York Times (20 April 1980) http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/lindbergh-jews.html
