Quotes About Intellectuals

I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers.

The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.

Let's to the Kit-Cat Clubb.

Colonization proposals were crafted by intellectuals, reformers, and politicians--men (and occasionally women) who saw themselves as liberal in their sentiments. To be liberal in the early United States involved specific beliefs and actions: it meant that you embraced the rational thought of the Enlightenment, that you manifested a Christian benevolence to others, and most importantly, that you were determined to reject the temptations of prejudice.

The conceit of literary intellectuals is to imagine that other people don't have ideas so that they can assume a superior status by having their own...

The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that the great success of Stalinism among the intellectuals could be attributed to one annihilating tactic. Stalinism replaced all debate about the merit of an argument, or a position, or even a person, with an inquiry about motive.

There's a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it's more complicated than that.

When intellectuals and artists withdraw from the fray, politicians feel safer.

Intellectuals and the elite in general are especially prone to the globalist disconnect, most idealistically a concern for global well-being amid local intractable pathologies, most truthfully at worst an end-of-history, megalomaniac impulse to solve innate problems on a grand scale once and for all.

Les aspirations accumulées de tout un pays, immergé depuis des décennies dans la sénescente torpeur communiste, convergeaient ici. Et au centre il n'y avait pas la culture, comme le croyaient les intellectuels convaincus d'hériter du sceptre et qui n'avaient rien hérité du tout. Au centre, il y avait la télévision.

A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals while others neglect their usual concerns - art, philosophy, scholarship - because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea.

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition—a desire with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another

Frank Schirrmacher's passing is a great loss. Among the intellectuals, he, along with Friedrich Kittler, was the only one who understood the philosophical dimensions of the Internet.

Some people spend their time reasoning and thinking out everything, and so anything that cannot be fully understood, they will not accept. We call these people 'intellectuals.'

The intellectual scholars who keep saying 'this is wrong' and 'that is wrong', are neither scholars nor intellectuals. In reality, they are more ignorant than the layman.

the value of intellectuals is neither their intellect nor the value of their intellect but the value of what they use their intellect to do

Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.

Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

Behaviorism was but one instance of a terrible temptation for all intellectuals, namely that of nothing-but-ism. History is nothing but the clash of class interests, human behavior is nothing but a response to economic incentives, etc., etc.

The family, with all its undoubted miseries (as well, of course, as joys) has long been the object of hate of ambitious intellectuals, for the family stands between the state, to be directed by intellectuals, and total power.