Quotes About Intellectuals

I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.

We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.

the most eminent intellectuals are those whose papers end up being cited the most; their ideas are "parents" to the greatest number of "offspring." Their ideas make it possible for other people to make their own statements.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

Authority has to exist before it can be limited, and it is authority that is in scarce supply in those modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.

Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media.

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

But biblical and other ancient Near Eastern sources do not share Enlightenment theology of sophisticated intellectuals (ancient and modern).

A nice street, Fred. A nice neighborhood. Oh, I know how the intellectuals sneer at suburbia - it's not as romantic as the rat-infested tenements or the hale-and-hearty back-to-the-land stuff. There are no great museums in suburbia, no great forests, no great challenges.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally 'respected'.

The critics of the New Deal exaggerated the power of the intellectuals and also portrayed them as impractical, irresponsible, conspiratorial experimentalists, grown arrogant and publicity-conscious because of their sudden rise from obscurity to prominence.

This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

God! How men of letters are stupid.

There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.

I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny.

History is the collective consciousness of the then intellectuals and not just some numbers, time and events.

Rational discourse is only one way of presenting and examining an issue and by no means the best. Our new intellectuals are not aware of its limitations and of the nature of the things outside.

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.

Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.

Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

Later the place was as deserted as Malcolm Muggeridge's Christmas party of fellow intellectuals.

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.