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Fools act on imagination without knowledge. Pedants act on knowledge without imagination. -- William Arthur Ward
Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity. -- Wilkie Collins
Silence is a trick when it imposes. Pedants and scholars, churchmen and physicians, abound in silent pride. -- Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
Robespierre, this pedant of freedom! -- Franz Grillparzer
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant. -- George Orwell
Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind. -- Wilfrid
Have you ever seen a pedant with a warm heart? -- Johann Kaspar Lavater
A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort. -- Thomas Carlyle
The nudes of art are not so distant from pornography as prudish pedants pretend. -- Mason Cooley
Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant. -- Lois McMaster Bujold
The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants. -- H. L. Mencken
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance. -- Vladimir Nabokov
History and war are cruel pedants. Those who know too little of the former are likely to have too much of the latter. -- Oliver North
My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen. -- George Weinberg
Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connoisseur appreciates only individual works. -- Franz Grillparzer
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. -- Miguel de Unamuno
God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers, who try to teach God his job as Creator. -- Elie Faure
The search for truth in cyberspace will take you through the wormhole, and there's nothing on the other side but pedants and nitpickers and bottomless ambiguity. If you're not careful, you'll spend all your time proving everything and understanding nothing. -- Mike Rowe
I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life. -- Scott Simon
A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition. -- Charles Caleb Colton
Pedants make a great rout about criticism, as if it were a science of great depth, and required much pains and knowledge--criticism however is only the result of good sense, taste and judgment--three qualities that indeed seldom are found together, and extremely seldom in a pedant, which most critics are. -- Horace Walpole
The main thing is, and of course this is a pedant talking, we should start our education on these issues in kindergarten. Instead of saying, "See Spot run," we ought to say, "See the plant grow in the sun." We ought to explain what runs the weather in the third or fourth grade to start out with. -- Paul R. Ehrlich
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit. -- Ludwig von Mises
It is an old trick. The playgoer who does not like dirty plays is denounced as a prude; the music-lover who resents cacophony is told he is a pedant; and in all these matters the final crushing blow administered to the man of discrimination is the ascription to him of a hidebound prejudice against things that are new because they are new. -- Royal Cortissoz
My fellow critics and I may occasionally fault a movie for departing, in detail or in spirit, from its literary source, but the grousing of a few adult pedants is nothing compared to the wrath of several million bookish 10-year-olds. Their presumed demands, and the hovering spirit of Harry's creator, J. K. Rowling, inhibit this movie as it did the first Potter film. -- A. O. Scott
Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants. -- Jonathan Swift
O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation -- Jeremy Bentham
It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality. -- Eric Hoffer

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