Quotes About Savants

The meaningless wordplays of modish francophone savants, splendidly exposed in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998), seem to have no other function than to impress the gullible.

makes no difference whether the translations in question are from the pens of Jews or non-Jews. In every single instance, where the non-Jew is responsible for the translation, the knowledge shown in the making of the translation was acquired from Jewish savants.

Like a stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians, thinkers, or savants.

There are estimated to be fewer that 50 prodigious savants worldwide. If we were brought together, it would be disappointing in the sense of us having different abilities. One thing that would make me feel united with them would be the sense of us having grown up in isolation.

We are, in many ways, the bastard children of Reason and Mysticism. Both have been banging away like libertines during the last 200 years, and we are, in many ways, their offspring. Without Reason, we would simply be mad savants, dancing to an aimless tune. Without Mysticism, we would be poseurs, desperately trying to be rebellious without the wisdom to pull it off. Magick, you see, is the ultimate rebellion, and we are its best chance for the future.

I think that a lot of people in all walks of life have the impression, of course, that, 'I specialize in something. I can't – I don't have the time to read other things. I'll just go to pure entertainment when I'm relaxing, and then I'll come back to my pure specialty.' That produces – that attitude produces idiot savants, unfortunately.

inside his head. It was said that savants

From its earliest, days, science has been associated with institutions—the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1609, the Royal Society in Britain, founded in 1660, the Académie des Sciences in France, founded in 1666—because scholars (savants and natural philosophers as they were variously called before the nineteenth-century invention of the word "scientist") understood that to create new knowledge they needed a means to test each other's claims.