Quotes About Intellectuals

He had the same trouble as all intellectuals—he was ineffectual. He knew too many things, and they confused him.

He thoroughly abhorred those bohemians who aped the ways of Paris and Hollywood, and he had nothing but disgust for all those cynical, uprooted intellectuals who knew only how to pour scorn and sarcasm on everything, together with their scribbles about modern art, which amounted to no more than the emperor's new clothes.

Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class.

The truth is that, for all their talk about social "roots," conservative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men themselves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they enveloped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them.

But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals.

world. Something practical was done with thought. The mental became also the real. Relief from the pursuit of absolutes made life pleasant. Only a small class of fanatical intellectuals, professionals, still chased after these absolutes.

There is, besides, a considerable tradition of left-wing anti-Semitism in France and Germany. The history of Socialist anti-Semitism is, alas, long and dirty, but I doubt that much of this older, leftist anti-Semitism has survived among European intellectuals.

Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.

This preoccupation with the difficulty of getting a thought out of one head and into another is something the industrialists share with a substantial number of intellectuals and creative writers, more and more of whom seem inclined to regard communication, or the lack of it, as one of the greatest problems not just of industry but of humanity.

Secular intellectuals, poor things, cannot win for losing. Even as contemporary philosophers move more and more beyond the modernist, critical, and reductionist habits of thought that grew up in the old Enlightenment, which was keyed to the old new science, the new technologies have simply created the opportunity for a new religious imagination.

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

The intellectuals, academics, scholars and visionary figures' notice, and attention prevail upon millions of the usual ones. Indeed, it shows a distinctive value between quality and quantity.

When a writer, hired one or politically, and emotionally related to a subject for whatever purposes, writes not in a neutral concept, and honest notion; indeed, then a lie becomes a significant and reliable history in the eyes of pseudo-intellectuals. Similarly, as a negative-minded focuses on the thorns of a rose, ignoring and avoiding its beauty and fragrance that prevails.

No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.

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

Unbelievably, while many non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and America's Watch have denounced the human rights situation in Cuba, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro.

The intelligentsia are those who have been educated beyond their intelligence.

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.'

Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.

One of the categories of people I don't like much are intellectuals. People say, 'Oh, you're an intellectual,' and I say, 'No!' What is an intellectual? An intellectual is somebody who thinks ideas are more important than people.

All Spanish intellectuals burst into one great song of joy and hope. Now Spain was clean. Now every Spaniard was wholly obedient to Church and King. Alone of all European countries, Spain was now one united mass of loyal men, believing and acting as one being. Every thinker and poet in Spain celebrated in book and song this glorious event, this blessed time, the dawn of Spain's Golden Age. It was the end of Spain.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.