Why are so many people ashamed of having intelligence and using it? There is nothing democratic about such an attitude. To pretend to be less intelli… - Robertson Davies

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Engraved portrait of Robertson Davies, facing right

Why are so many people ashamed of having intelligence and using it? There is nothing democratic about such an attitude. To pretend to be less intelligent that one is deceives nobody and begets dislike, for intelligence cannot be hidden; like a cough, it will out, stifle it how you may. No man has ever won commendation for standing at less than his full height, either physically, morally, or intellectually.

English
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About Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies CC (August 28 1913 – December 2 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist and professor.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer (Public domain / CC0)

Also Known As

Alternative Names: William Robertson Davies

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Additional quotes by Robertson Davies

No need to go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not what I have come to Zürich to learn.

As for an afterlife, there has been a general decline in the general acceptance of it as a certainty, and though a few rationalists may be pleased, to many people this has added a new terror to death. We are reluctant, in the main, to consider the disappearance of ourselves and consequently all we feel and know. Every man's death is, literally, the end of a world if he dies without hope. We have exchanged Gone Elsewhere for Gone Nowhere.

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