Quotes About Intellectuals

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

The trouble with me is, I belong to a vanishing race. I'm one of the intellectuals.

El gobierno eligió el 24 de abril de 1915 —fecha en que a partir de entonces se conmemora el genocidio armenio— para detener y asesinar a los principales intelectuales armenios de Constantinopla. Y continuaron el pogromo con la destrucción general y sistemática de la raza armenia en Turquía.

This "filtering down" is not a mechanical process in which ideas of intellectuals just happen to come to the attention of the general public. It is instead a conscious effort on the part of intellectuals to alter Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves, an effort, among other things, to weaken or destroy Americans' attachment to their country and to Western civilization.

There are men who, at the bottom of the ladder, battle to rise; they study, struggle, keep their wits alive and eventually get up to a place where they are received as an equal among respectable intellectuals. Here they find warmth and comfort for their pride, and here the struggle ends, and a death of many years commences. They could have gone on living.

The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on. At

When the chips are down, Orwell argued, our workers do not defend their class but their country, and they associate their country with a gentle way of life in which unusual and eccentric habits – such as not killing one another – are accepted as the way things are. In these respects, Orwell also thought, the leftist intellectuals will always misunderstand the workers, who want nothing to do with a self-vaunting disloyalty that only intellectuals can afford.

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s.

Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism. Such doctrines cannot rise to the ascendancy, neither among the intellectuals nor in the mind of the public, except in a culture already saturated with a mystical-collectivist philosophy. In the case of Germany, this means: saturated with the ideas of Hegel.

The German university students were among the earliest groups to back Hitler. The intellectuals were among his regime's most ardent supporters. Professors with distinguished academic credentials, eager to pronounce their benediction on the Führer's cause, put their scholarship to work full time; they turned out a library of admiring volumes, adorned with obscure allusions and learned references.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

If but a small part of Mme. Curie's strength of character and devotion were alive in Europe's intellectuals, Europe would face a brighter future.

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and interest in facts. Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority. Among the masses "instinct is supreme, and from instinct comes faith...

Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies. They regard oversimplification as the original sin of the mind and have not use for the slogans, the unqualified assertion and sweeping generalization which are the propagandist´s stock in the trade.

Los intelectuales de Occidente son todos aficionados a la silla. Por eso la mayoría de ustedes son tan repulsivamente malsanos.

Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That's why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome.

Those regularly-featured Hollywood males made her feel slightly nauseous; and the same could be said for their female equivalents, hardly intellectuals they. These people had regular features but were actually ugly because they tended to be so completely vacuous. Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy.

Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. "The idea, it seems, came from Russia," the New York Times reported. "The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair."2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too.

Then he said, leaning forward: 'You're strange animals, you women intellectuals. Tell me: what's it like to be a woman?' I took my rifle from behind my chair and shot him dead. 'It's like that,' I said.

If it happens, the fall of liberal democracy in our own time will not look as it did in the 1920s or 1930s. But it will still require a new elite, a new generation of clercs, to bring it about. The collapse of an idea of the West, or of what is sometimes called "the Western liberal order," will need thinkers, intellectuals, journalists, bloggers, writers, and artists to undermine our current values, and then to imagine the new system to come.