Quotes About Intellectuals

First the Communists killed all the smart people who made things work in the cities. And now they want to make doing good at anything at all a punishable crime! What has happened to the world?

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Paradoxical as it sounds, many intellectuals prefer life in the mud to life in clear water.

Intellectuals are a pretty unique species all by themselves, given to advocating things out of sheer brazenness that they could not themselves stomach if they were ushered in to witness the scene.

All the great religious doctrines of Asia are creations of intellectuals.

Parfümierte, wortreiche, handlungsarme Ideenromane, die deshalb von den Deutschen geliebt werden, weil dieser Mann [Thomas Mann] genauso ein Heuchler war wie sie selbst.

Thank God I am not an intellectual! What a garbage of knowledge, what an unnecessary glossary of terms they have, those intellectuals!

Social pressure is the fascism of the democracies. Fascism is the democracy of the ruthless. Social engineering is the opiate of romantic intellectuals.

He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. 'What's the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more then there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.

He is, and is pleased to let everybody know it, a winner-take-all businessman—the worst nightmare of sentimental, lefty intellectuals, which is exactly what so many of the Bancrofts have become.

Selon Troubetskoï, "nous devons nous habituer à l'idée que le monde romano-germanique, avec toute sa culture, soit notre pire ennemi. Nous devons renverser et piétiner sans pitié les idoles des idéaux sociaux et des préjugés empruntés à l'Occident, qui orientent toujours les idées de nos intellectuels

You're what," I asked, "Catholic? Fascist? Both?" It just popped out. I was out of practice with intellectuals of the right—I couldn't remember how to behave. All at once, in the distance, we heard a kind of sustained crackling. "What was that, do you think?" asked Alice. "It sounded like shooting," she added, hesitantly. We fell silent

I was) slightly suspicious of these babbling children of intellectuals who were themselves babblers, my schoolmates who had already produced the next senile generation . . . I had noticed that behind their masks people were actually unhelpful, cold, brutally indifferent toward everything that at the moment did not fall within the sphere of their immediate interest.

It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State.

For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals." For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals.

He seeks to show that the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept State rule, and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded subjects.

You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them

America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

The worst aspect of the fear the ayatollahs spread was that Western intellectuals were afraid of admitting that they were afraid. If they had been honest, they would have forced society to confront the fact of censorship. As it was, their silence made the enemies of liberalism stronger.

Academics, students, readers of and writers for most leftish newspapers and all but the bravest Muslim and poor world intellectuals share this group's defining unwillingness to condemn crimes that can't be blamed on the West.

After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves.

Intellectuals who had made it to the West were beyond the reach of oppressive forces. They had a place of sanctuary. The fatwa changed all that. It redrew the boundaries of the free world, shrinking its borders and erasing zones of disputation from the map of the liberal mind.

Revolutionary intellectuals have the historic mission of inventing the vocabulary and the themes for the next tyranny.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.