Top 58 Intelligentsia Quotes
#1. The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.
Thomas Sowell
#2. Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general.
Louis MacNeice
#3. He saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse.
Clive James
#4. How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?
John Maynard Keynes
#5. When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.
Steve Erickson
#6. One should herd the entire intelligentsia into a mine and then blow it sky-high.
Heinrich Muller
#7. Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a 'popular piety' claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.
J.I. Packer
#8. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
George Orwell
#9. The gentry's jurisdiction over the peasantry was restored. The universities were closed to the children of the lower classes; the radical literary periodicals were banned; the nation, including the intelligentsia, was to be forced back into mute submission. Revolutionary
Isaac Deutscher
#10. It is depressing but not shocking to witness the liberal intelligentsia embrace Ari Shavit so enthusiastically. Shavit is someone who is as consistently wrong as Thomas Friedman on major issues, and at least as much a courtier of power.
Max Blumenthal
#11. Video games are the comic books of our time ... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia.
Guillermo Del Toro
#12. Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.
Noam Chomsky
#13. The last refuge of the intelligentsia: when life gets too difficult, go find something to read.
Judith Flanders
#14. We shall solve this problem, and afterwards Warsaw as the Capital and the pool of intelligentsia of that nation will be destroyed.
Heinrich Himmler
#15. The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
#16. We once again see the painful reality of the spineless political intelligentsia
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#17. The Soviet "creative intelligentsia" - that is, people accustomed to thinking one thing, saying another and doing a third - is as a whole an even more unpleasant phenomenon than the regime which gave it birth.
Andrei Amalrik
#18. Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.
George Gilder
#19. The idea of a revolution through the people was gradually replaced by that of a conspiracy to be planned and carried out by a small and determined minority from the intelligentsia.
Isaac Deutscher
#20. When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
Thomas Sowell
#21. The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history.
Peter Saunders
#22. Dublin was hardly worried by the war; her old preoccupations were still preoccupations. The intelligentsia continued their parties; their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever.
Louis MacNeice
#23. Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.
Diane Abbott
#24. A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
Eric Hoffer
#25. The intelligent are to the intelligentsia what a gentleman is to a gent.
Stanley Baldwin
#26. What is this bluestocking?"
"A woman who fancies herself a member of the intelligentsia." He lowered his voice. "It's against the laws of nature."
Alexsey lifted his brows. "Why are you whispering? Afraid of bluestockings, are you?"
"All smart men are.
Karen Hawkins
#27. The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture.
Hu Shih
#28. It is to be hoped you are not 'intellectual,' which is an unpardonable trait
Mary MacLane
#29. The liberal intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests.
Ralph Nader
#30. the Great Vaccination - the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia.
Alvaro De Campos
#32. The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience.
Lech Walesa
#33. It's among the intelligentsia that we often find the glib compulsion to explain everything and to understand nothing.
Joost Meerloo
#34. I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.
Richard Dawkins
#35. In Europe, people in the arts are considered part of the intelligentsia; they are considered part of the elite.
Ron Silver
#36. The Black Panther Party was not a gang. They grew out of a young black intelligentsia on college campuses.
Bobby Seale
#37. The intelligentsia ... was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses.
Maxim Gorky
#38. You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Thomas Sowell
#39. The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.
Arthur Koestler
#40. The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical
Arthur Koestler
#41. What's similar between 'Daily Show' and 'RJ Berger' is that people are grabbing me - not quite the groovy intelligentsia Starbucks barista, but the Latina nurses at my gynecologist's office - and telling me they love the show.
Beth Littleford
#42. It is amazing how many of the intelligentsia call it "greed" to want to keep what you have earned, but not greed to want to take away what somebody else has earned, and let politicians use it to buy votes.
Thomas Sowell
#43. He's clever,' thought Ivan,' I must admit there are some smart people even among the intelligentsia
Mikhail Bulgakov
#44. Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.
Thomas Sowell
#45. Well, I guess [2001: A Space Odyssey] legitimized [science fiction], particularly for people who looked down on science fiction; you know, the intelligentsia. My definition of the intelligentsia: someone who's educated beyond their intelligence.
Arthur C. Clarke
#46. Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.
W. Somerset Maugham
#47. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.
George Orwell
#49. To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.
Adolf Hitler
#50. On campuses, and when I speak to the younger intelligentsia, I am getting a hunger for the text - the authentic text for Jewish knowledge.
Arthur Hertzberg
#51. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
George Orwell
#52. My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
Alison Bechdel
#53. The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.
Arthur Koestler
#54. I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that - humorists they are sometimes called - are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.
P.G. Wodehouse
#55. Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.
Ishmael Reed
#56. If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus
more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
Thomas Sowell
#57. Anthony Howard, then editor of the left-wing New Statesman, once pointed out that if Huey Long had only used left-wing phraseology he would have enjoyed wide support from the New York and London intelligentsia.
Robert Conquest
#58. It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box
George Orwell
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