Quotes About Intellectuals

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around the world? Want to undermine governments that are raising their people up from poverty because they don't conform to the tastes of Upper West Side intellectuals? Use human rights as your excuse!

Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion.

Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.

Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.

Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood - not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.

The American people want their presidents to articulate big ideas and leave the details to the eggheads.

Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.

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.

All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'.

confronted with a choice between the pollution of Maurras and the pollution of tourism, the intellectuals chose to remake the emptiness rather than abide with the many.

Just as starry-eyed Western intellectuals in the twentieth century would transfer to the Soviet Union all their own fantasies of the ideal state, so the idealists of late eighteenth-century Europe doted on the American Eden.

intellectuals became preoccupied with an aspiration as fundamental in humans as the urge for individual autonomy: the need to belong.

Lewis was an exceptionally skillful exposer of ideological forces and their titanic influence over us, but he rarely gets credit for this from contemporary intellectuals because it is their most treasured beliefs that, more often than not, he is exposing. So instead of praising him for the acuity of his insights, they call him "reactionary" or "Victorian

Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers... and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.

No Oxford don was forgiven for writing books outside his field of study—except for detective stories which dons, like everyone else, read when they are down with the 'flu. But it was considered unforgivable that Lewis wrote international best-sellers, and worse still that many were of a religious nature." Lewis

This is who Shakespeare was meant for: not The New York Times! Not intellectuals. Just plain folks. You play Shakespeare's music right for a real house and that shit goes up all by itself.

The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.