Public Intellectual Quotes

#1. I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

Reid Hoffman

#2. I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-sustaining and autonomously financed. Susan was pre-eminently one such.

Christopher Hitchens

#3. The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.

Pankaj Mishra

#4. I am not indifferent to the appreciation of kind people. [The voters were] extremely kind in naming me the world's top public intellectual, a title to which I can never see myself as entitled.

Fethullah Gulen

#5. The problem with becoming a public intellectual is that over time you grow more and more public but less and less intellectual.

Jean Bethke Elshtain

#6. Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

Susie Orbach

#7. Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.

Julian Assange

#8. Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the signs of our times as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world.

Namsoon Kang

#9. Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.

George McGovern

#10. [The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.
Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and
compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it
instead into meek subservience to authority.

Walter Karp

#11. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.

Kim Gordon

#12. It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages.

Wendy Kaminer

#13. When public and private sectors combine intellectual and other resources, more can be achieved.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

#14. What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.54

Richard Dawkins

#15. Nothing disfigures the intellectual's public
performance as much as trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatizing apostasy.

Edward Said

#16. I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#17. You can put a public school and university in the middle of every block of every city in America - but you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.

Billy Graham

#18. His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. 'Tragedy excites the soul,' he later told one of his secretaries, 'lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.'24

Andrew Roberts

#19. A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread - not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group.

George Orwell

#20. The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.

Naomi Klein

#21. Comedy to me has always seemed a social tightrope for the comedian. For all things intellectually sound the general public would prefer to be amused, but in all things emotionally sound, it then chooses to get offended.

Criss Jami

#22. My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.

Noam Chomsky

#23. Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

Arthur C. Clarke

#24. Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

Samuel E. Morison

#25. I think the general public's response to my projects is very strong. You can be an intellectual and say that popularity detracts from architectural quality. On the other hand, you can see in the public's identification something very positive.

Moshe Safdie

#26. Historically, women have pushed each other into, and supported each other within, intellectual and public realms to which men rarely extended invitations, let alone any promise of equality.

Rebecca Traister

#27. In these days of intellectual awakening and steadily asserting public opinion, the holy places of the Hindus, their condition, and method of work have not escaped tile keen eye of criticism; and this city, being the holy of holies to all Hindus, has not failed to attract its full share of censure.

Swami Vivekananda

#28. Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.

H.G.Wells

#29. the regime's utter cultural and intellectual mediocrity, and especially its obsession with ensuring a rigid outward conformity to its neo-traditionalist values in public life.

Helen Graham

#30. Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one's own suckering.

Fred Reed

#31. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.

Paul Krugman

#32. The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.

Milton Friedman

#33. An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites.

Pankaj Mishra