Years ago, when my little sister was working on her MA at U Virginia, I was able to score a training cross-country flight with a student who had graduated from Virginia, and who wanted to go there for a weekend. So we flew a Navy T-34C into Charlottesville.
My sister invited me to a graduate student party, primarily English and Art department students. Her friends were pretty cool, but some of her acquaintances were Ivory Tower jackasses.
One, in particular, who knew I was a Navy officer, assumed I must be some knuckle-dragging Neanderthal since I'd opted to go into the military, instead of higher education. I guess he never thought about the fact that, after all, I was my sister's brother - and my sister was at or near the top of her class.
So, after he had made some cutting comments about the general lack of intellectual capability in the armed forces, I hit him with one of my favorite quotes, from Sir William Francis Butler:
Quote:
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The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
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Since he didn't think himself a fool, that left him with only one viable option, in Butler's world view.
The graduate student promptly found another conversation partner.