Quotes About Intellectuals

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.

Intellectuals should never marry; they won't enjoy it; and besides, they should not reproduce themselves.

Intellectuals in Edinburgh were thrilled, not offended, when in the summer of 1761 the Irish actor and "orthoepist" (or pronunciation expert) Thomas Sheridan arrived in town to offer a series of lectures on English elocution.

Luis Vives, que veía venir la tostada, había escrito: Ya nadie podrá cultivar las buenas letras en España sin que al punto se descubra en él un cúmulo de herejías, errores y taras judaicas. Esto ha impuesto silencio a los doctos.

The claim that nations and nationalism are modern ideological constructs invented by intellectuals and spread by means of state authority and the state's apparatuses is a misleading half-truth that is itself a modernist (or postmodernist) ideological construct originating with intellectuals and requiring deconstruction.

In the transformed world political context of today, it is more essential than ever that the critique of democracy in the name of difference developed by oppositional intellectuals be formulated so carefully that these thoughts cannot be exploited for nationalist, tribalist, and xenophobic purposes. It is imperative that the politics of the 'differend' not be settled beyond and at the margins of democratic politics.

My parents are both intellectuals and readers; my mother would take me to the library every few days from before I was one year old.

The bookshelves were lined with Joan Didion and Flannery O'Connor, a small, unexpected collection of musicalia, essay collections on Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. There was a framed poster of an exhibit of romantic landscape paintings in Dresden. Intellectuals had their own thing going, that was for sure.

Much of the academic world and academic institutions are run according to this metaphor, which is based on Strict Father morality. Intellectuals who accept this view of the academic world may be political liberals, but they are intimately acquainted with Strict Father morality and practice it in their everyday professional lives. Feminisms

Sometimes I get intimidated by people, intellectuals, because I don't have a great education. The only thing I feel helps me compete with all these people, people with degrees from Harvard, that you're thrown in with and have to work with, is that I'm grounded.

Writers and intellectuals have a duty to humanity. It is to insist that the human entity remains the primary asset in overall development; thus, it must be safeguarded.

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

Because in the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.

In individuals, as in society, high culture, sensibility and intelligence can, at times, coexist with the fanaticism of the torturer and the assassin. In the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns. When religion and the state become confused, freedom irremediably disappears.

Într-o clasificare dup? merite, pe primul loc se afl? militarii. ÎÅŸi fac datoria, se Å£in foarte puÅ£in de intrigi, nu pierd timpul. Apoi, t?ranii. (…) Urmeaz? funcÅ£ionarii, întreprinz?torii, comercianÅ£ii. LiteraÅ£ii ÅŸi intelectualii – ultimii. Chiar ÅŸi dup? preoÅ£i… O adun?tur? de canalii.

Resulta increíble que filósofos respetables, como Merleau-Ponty en su libro Humanisme et terreur, validaran esas monstruosidades jurídicas —verdaderos asesinatos legales—en nombre de la «verdad esencial» de la lucha de clases y del partido comunista como representante y vanguardia del proletariado.

Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures—intellectuals, athletes, musicians—stepped up to announce their opposition

Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun.

Increasingly the United States found itself isolated. Having for two decades enjoyed its status as champion of the free world, it was increasingly the target of bitter criticism abroad and at home, where a growing number of prominent intellectuals and church leaders denounced the bombing campaign as barbaric. The military might disdain the fickle nature of public sympathy, but a democracy cannot sustain a war effort without it, and moral revulsion was growing.

The intellectuals have never been on the side of the workers. Sometimes they've let on to be, but only for purposes of betrayal.

Some men, instead of building their existence upon the indefinite unfolding of time, propose to assert it in its eternal aspect & to achieve it as an absolute. They hope, thereby, to surmount the ambiguity of their condition. Thus, many intellectuals seek their salvation in either in critical thought or creative activity.

Imagine that the devil is in the process of buying the soul of some poor afflicted being, and that someone, taking pity on the one afflicted, were to intervene in the debate and say to the devil: it is really shameful for you to offer only this price; the thing is worth at least twice that. This sinister farce is what is being played out in the workers' movement by the syndicates, parties, and intellectuals of the left.