Quotes About Thinkers

Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who "created" fascism.

All great thinkers are initially ridiculed – and eventually revered.

Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free.

for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand.

All great thinkers are initially ridiculed - and eventually revered.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.

Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.

Socrates immersed himself in the cutting-edge intellectual work of his day, then transcended it. He took advantage of the fact that the most exciting thinkers in the Western world were drawn to Athens. He sought them out, learned what they had to teach, then challenged what he had learned to enhance his own understanding.

This was a revolution waged by thinkers and debaters constantly prattling about the reasons for the war. Although they were "rebels," the Americans were very chatty about their revolution. By contrast, mob uprisings like the French Revolution are sparked by tumult, pandemonium, and violence, not thoughtful sermons and pamphlets. There

And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy.

New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics.

WHETHER people who are greatly respected know what they are saying: Laura (Riding) Jackson warns of the danger that "thinkers" can constitute for the rest of humanity.

Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class "victims" of imaginary wrongs.

The American masses were not rising up demanding to sterilize, institutionalize and dehumanize their neighbors and kinfolk. Eugenics was a movement of the nation's elite thinkers and many of its most progressive reformers.

You were born to be among the advisors and thinkers, the spiritual and moral leaders of your society. There is every reason for pride.

Usted nació para estar entre los consejeros y los pensadores, entre los líderes espirituales y morales de su sociedad. Tiene todos los motivos para sentirse orgulloso.

Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

Individual development depends upon mass-solution of the economic problems of everyday living. The inventors, thinkers, and the common man have made this world ripe for healthful leisure, and have created far more than enough goods for all. But through all this progress the business man has assumed the right to the lion's share while those who did the creating and hard work were compelled to fight for whatever they could get-or starve.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

L'ateismo, per me, non è un risultato, e tanto meno un avvenimento - come tale non lo conosco: io lo intendo per istinto. Sono troppo curioso, troppo problematico, troppo tracotante, perché possa piacermi una risposta grossolana. Dio è una risposta grossolana, un'indelicatezza verso noi pensatori - in fondo è solo un grossolano divieto che ci viene fatto: non dovete pensare!

Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid.… The Germans – once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things

It is a terrible thought, to contemplate that an immense number of mediocre thinkers are occupied with really influential matters.