Quotes About Intellectuals

there does in fact prevail a much greater unanimity among thinking persons, than might be supposed from their diametrical divergence on the great questions of moral metaphysics

Catholic intellectuals in both Europe and the United States used a strategy similar to that of international socialists, promoting a universalist ideology as a mechanism for disentangling race, nation, and state.

It is often supposed that those who live and work in academic or intellectual circles are above the petty disputes that vex the rest of us, but it does sometimes seem as if the exalted nature of their work makes it necessary for them to descend occasionally and to refresh themselves, as it were, by squabbling about trivialities.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during 'God save the King'. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so 'enlightened' that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.

In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

El ataque directo y consciente contra la honradez intelectual procede de los propios intelectuales.

Impatience [...] is a twentieth-century virtue. At twenty, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed, they realised they would not have the strength to wait. Like anyone else, they could have made it; but all they wanted was to have it made. That is probably the sense in which they were what are commonly called intellectuals.

Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.

I don't think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it's something they can use. It's not something they live.

One can see the professionals and intellectuals talking to their rural brethren with an amused and condescending smile. They forget that but for the toiling rural masses, all their professional training and erudition would collapse like a castle of cards.

I should buy Le Monde. It is, after all, the chosen newspaper of les intellos and it remains the benchmark in France for good journalism.

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.

Along with all else, Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it's about time.

However, it's in a less formal book by Bentham, The Commonplace Book, that you find the phrase 'the happiness of the greatest number', which really sums up the philosophy. ('commonplace books' being a kind of posh scrapbook popular at the time with intellectuals to copy out their favourite poems and so on.)

I feel a rush of anger at those grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters who constantly carp about this great country. Frankly, they can only do it because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all our imperfections, we are a genuine democracy.

The revolution in Manila was being led by young intellectuals, sons of merchants and professionals who had been educated in Europe and who had planned their revolt using the theories of the French Revolution. Isio had long, scraggly hair, bare feet, and eyes that betrayed the many years of sadness and labor his people had endured. With a look of pity and incredulity, Salas finally asked, "How is it possible that you survived?

The public interest has shifted from the nature of man to the nature of nature and to the prospects of domination its exploration opened; and the loss of interest even turned to hatred when the nature of man proved to be resistant to the changes dreamed up by intellectuals who want to add the lordship of society and history to the mastery of nature.

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography.

Rudi listed his objections to communism: "The exaggerations in the press, the primitive tone of some articles, the boring speeches filled with jargon, the arrogant dismissal of opposing views, the ham-fisted behaviour towards intellectuals, whom you isolate instead of winning over, insulting opponents instead of disarming them with logic and recruiting them.

Our first clue, included in each of the Sistine portraits of the sibyls and prophets—save one—is a scroll or a book, symbolizing literacy. Through his use of books and writing, Michelangelo is showing us that he believes these seers were the intellectuals of their respective times and places.

You have to understand that the I.D.W. emerged as a response to a world where perfectly reasonable intellectuals were being regularly mislabeled by activists, institutions, and mainstream journalists with every career-ending epithet from 'Islamophobe' to 'Nazi.'

Never trust in theories, m'lad, if they're thought up by types who work in offices.

In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.