Quotes About Intellectuals

Just as political correctness finds its most avid supporters on today's university campuses, the intellectuals of earlier times generally went along with the religious establishment. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Conspiracy theories encourage the masses to believe in lurid nonsense and to denounce intellectuals, who are supposedly all in on the conspiracy and hard at work to deceive and enslave the people. But mediocrities, so we are to believe, can see through all intellectual bullshit … they know experts are idiots. Here we have the Dunning-Kruger effect in full flow, shining like the dumbest star in the sky, the one that hovered above that grubby stable in Bethlehem.

?Let your pretence of arrogance grow big as a Dinosaur, so that the fake intellectuals start to realize their true inferiority in front of you.

Where would you intellectuals be without us lower grade morons to lead you around? Totally lost, that's where!

How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds — and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference — numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.

I believe it was Jean Améry who noted that the first to bow to the oppressor's system and to adopt its doctrines and methods were the intellectuals. But not all of them. Not the rabbis and priests, who, after all, were intellectuals too. With a single exception, no rabbi agreed to become a kapo. All refused to barter their own survival by becoming tools of the hangman. All preferred to die rather than serve death. The lessons of the prophets and the sages became shields for them. On

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

I allowed myself to be taken in by the intellectuals. I believed too much in the Polish intellectuals and followed their advice.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

When the so-called masses are discontented, they are inspired by specific grievances that are capable of being satisfied within the existing system. Only intellectuals have universal grievances: only they believe that nothing can change unless everything changes.

Jesus said, "I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes" (Matthew 11:25). Why would this be? I believe that God desires that His message not be perverted, this message which has eternal significance. Intellectuals are seldom capable of conveying a message just as they have received it, without giving it a personal twist; whereas the simple, ignorant people transmit it faithfully.

I wonder how harmless, such people are? To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belittlers?

Historically, both Marxist and liberal intellectuals, in their efforts to remake societies after Soviet and Western models, have tragically underestimated these traditional loyal ties existing below the level of the state.

I've seen what rational thought leads to. Dumbest people I ever met were intellectuals.

What excites me about America is its social mobility, people continually rising from the bottom to the top and altering the culture in the process. On another level, however, we remain a nation that lives in social ghettos. Celebrities generally congregate around other celebrities; academics and intellectuals are cloistered in their worlds; people like to associate with those of their kind. If we leave these narrow worlds, it is usually as an observer of another way of life.

intellectuals have grown too comfortable with the achievements of the European Enlightenment and complacent with the beliefs that religious intolerance, violence, and wars are things of the past, and that religiously motivated violence or subjugation can be committed only by "others" against the West but not by the West against the other.

The fact that a brush is depicted in the Party emblem together with a hammer and sickle clearly shows that our party defines intellectuals as an integral part along with workers and peasants. It was our Party alone which regarded intellectuals as a part of the main revolutionary force from the first days of revolution and depicted a brush in its emblem along with a hammer and a sickle.

Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite – politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.

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

Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

The overwhelming majority of our nation - intellectuals, academics, theologians, the greats, and the leadership - are in favor of getting the sanctions removed.

Like a stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians, thinkers, or savants.

There never was a "golden age" in which European elites genuinely liked America. To be still more precise, an era never existed in which European intellectuals and literati—European elites—viewed the United States without a solid base of resentment, or better, ressentiment.

It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.