“According to Aristotle then excellence of character and intelligence cannot be separated. Here Aristotle expresses a view characteristically at odds with that dominant in the modern world. The modern view is expressed at one level in such banalities as ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ and at another in such profundities as Kant’s distinction between the good will, the possession of which alone is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth, and what he took to be a quite distinct natural gift, that of knowing how to apply general rules to particular cases, a gift the lack of which is called stupidity. So for Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.”

Source: After Virtue (1981), p. 154.

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Alasdair MacIntyre12

Scottish philosopher 1929

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“The disposition to consider intelligence a peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have celebrated this disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has not voiced all the aspirations of humanity, nor could it be expected to voice an aspiration that has not characteristically belonged to the English race; the praise of intelligence is not one of its characteristic glories. “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will he clever.” [Charles Kingsley, “A Farewell”] Here is the startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak head.”

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Source: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (1915), p. 5

“Aristotle’s perspective is not ours. Modern political discussion is imbued with a concern for individual human rights; we look to institutions to hold accountable those who wield power over their fellows, so that the rights of individuals are respected. Aristotle does not. Because he sees the world in teleological terms, he asks—as Plato did—how we can ensure that the state functions as it should. The excellence of the citizenry and the excellence of the constitution are understood in that light. Hence, of course, Aristotle’s focus on the collective intelligence and collective good sense of collectives; if “the many” are not to be trusted, it remains true that many heads are better than one.”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

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“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

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“These three activities, then, intelligence, love and creative action, which are so closely involved in one another, I cannot but feel to be intrinsically good. In their outstanding expressions they are good in an outstanding degree. Together they form the distinctively human kind of behaviour.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Other texts

“Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever;
Do noble things, not dream them, all day long:
And so make life, death, and that vast for-ever
One grand, sweet song.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

A Farewell http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1191.html (1856), st. 2,

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Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

“In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

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“Inner experience … is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. … It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

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“To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.”

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“Aristotle described the Crow as chaste. In some departments of knowledge, Aristotle was too innocent for his own good.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

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