Quotes About Intellectuals

#1. However superficially appealing, the idea that a religious tradition could be saved from crisis because a group of intellectuals radically reinterpreted its sacred texts is the kind of conceit that only, well, an intellectual could possibly believe.

Ross Douthat

#2. Trendy intellectuals always take action for every cause that's been in fashion.

Ray Davies

#3. Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

Ayn Rand

#4. Just as political correctness finds its most avid supporters on today's university campuses, the intellectuals of earlier times generally went along with the religious establishment. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

David P. Clark

#5. I like being surrounded by students and intellectuals.

Louis Garrel

#6. Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.

Thomas Sowell

#7. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?

Martijn Benders

#8. I know I've got a degree. Why does that mean I have to spend my life with intellectuals? I've got a lifesaving certificate but I don't spend my evenings diving for a rubber brick with my pyjamas on.

Victoria Wood

#9. Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way

Marcel Proust

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

Antonio Gramsci

#11. I like to go to Starbucks and watch the intellectuals. I observe them and their intellectualness. They in turn observe me drinking coffee and being a creeper.

Ryan Lilly

#12. A society without intellectuals is like a body without a head

Ayn Rand

#13. Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

Manuel Puig

#14. The left-wing thinkers and intellectuals have been more misogynist with me than the army. They can't accept that a young woman is able to think, and they underestimate the intellectual work and study I might have done. They ask who is the man behind me.

Maria De Medeiros

#15. Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them.

Peter Saunders

#16. I realised quite early on that, although I wasn't trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.

Benedict Cumberbatch

#17. Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became 'pro'-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.

Norman Finkelstein

#18. Screaming racism is the last refuge of leftist intellectuals who've completely lost their mojo.

Neal Boortz

#19. It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

Antonio Tabucchi

#20. The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

Eric Hoffer

#21. Being an intellectual among intellectuals means nothing. There must be more.

Darnell Lamont Walker

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

Norman Tebbit

#23. 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.

Terry Teachout

#24. Country and western is ignored by the intellectuals. They don't look at it as an art form. They think it's just somebody sitting on his couch singing about his life.

Ricky Skaggs

#25. Intellectuals are a pretty unique species all by themselves, given to advocating things out of sheer brazenness that they could not themselves stomach if they were ushered in to witness the scene.

Matthew Scully

#26. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.

Jonathan Sacks

#27. unscientific ways of thinking will dominate scientific thinking among human intellectuals, and lead to the collapse of the entire scientific system of thought.

Liu Cixin

#28. Intellectuals are not defined according to the jobs they do, but [by] the manner in which they act, the way they see themselves, and the values that they uphold.

Frank Furedi

#29. intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

Noam Chomsky

#30. Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

Lillian Hellman

#31. What greater prestige can a man like me (not too gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other about?

Raymond Chandler

#32. But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

Ellen Glasgow

#33. I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

Steven Pinker

#34. I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny.

Greta Gerwig

#35. Let's face it, most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are
and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.

Thomas Sowell

#36. I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.
(pg 370)

G. Willow Wilson

#37. Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

Caitlin Moran

#38. The suspicion and antagonism of academics, clerics and intellectuals towards the market ... go hand in hand with their disdain for the preference and habits of ordinary people.

Peter Thomas Bauer

#39. Are you apathetic toward the saccharine goodness evangelized by sentimental, superstitious fanatics, but equally bored by the intellectuals who worship at the empty-headed shrine of scientific materialism?

Rob Brezsny

#40. That's ONE thing that's wrong with intellectuals and writers - they don't feel a hell of a lot except their own comfort or their own pain. which is normal but shitty.

Charles Bukowski

#41. Music has a role, fashion has a role, cinema has a role, intellectuals have a role, parliamentarians, politicians, diplomats
all of it.

Riyad Mansour

#42. But the Spain which emerged around 1960, beginning with its economic miracle, created by the invasion of tourists, can no longer result in impassioned dedication on the part of its intellectuals, and even less on the part of foreign intellectuals.

Juan Goytisolo

#43. Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.

Henry Giroux

#44. Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.

Bernard Bailyn

#45. A nation of intellectuals, a nation of thugs/Jesus is hate, a nation of Satan is love!

Vinnie Paz

#46. Is it possible, then, to doubt that we can and must gain victory over the German invaders? The enemy is not as strong as some terror-stricken pseudo-intellectuals picture him. The devil is not as terrible as he is painted.

Joseph Stalin

#47. 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.

Wole Soyinka

#48. Intellect is not wisdom.

Thomas Sowell

#49. You're a genius! And the proof is that both common people and intellectuals find your work completely incoherent.

Woody Allen

#50. Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

Christopher Hitchens

#51. The young intellectuals are all chanting, "Revolution, Revolution," but I say the revolution will have to start in our homes, by achieving equal rights for women.

Qiu Jin

#52. Intellectuals are rarely successful as leaders. They are so trapped in their ideals that they cannot venture out in the real world to win and lead.

Awdhesh Singh

#53. In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from 'real intellectuals.

Jack Kerouac

#54. The People's' historic duty was to become a nameless herd and submit to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals.

Charles Portis

#55. My very first products were hand-made, one-of-a-kind pins. When I finally realized I could repeat a phrase to make multiples, 'intellectuals gone bad,' a fairly succinct description of my own life, seemed appropriate.

Anne Taintor

#56. So-called intellectuals have ego-power; Fools have willpower.

Saurabh Sharma

#57. We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.

Samuel Fuller

#58. Poets and intellectuals ... are the ones the tyrants go after first.

Frederick Smock

#59. Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.

Henry A. Kissinger

#60. Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.

Steven Pinker

#61. The views of intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow ... What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been described long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles.

Friedrich Hayek

#62. My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.
[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]

Arthur C. Clarke

#63. Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#64. Hatred of popular culture was to define a generation of American intellectuals and their claim to a superior sensibility.

Anonymous

#65. Abetted by misguided or co-opted intellectuals, the rulers weave a cloak of legitimacy to disguise their theft and hence to ease their extraction of wealth from the rightful owners.

Robert Higgs

#66. I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I'm here to tell you I'm quite the opposite in real life. In fact I'm a f**king fantastic lover.

Benedict Cumberbatch

#67. Intellectuals incline to be individualists, or even independents, are not team conscious and tend to regard obedience as a surrender of personality.

Harold Nicolson

#68. Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.

Thomas Sowell

#69. My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them, but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.

Jacob Rothschild

#70. There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals can believe in them, particularly left-wing intellectuals.

Poul Anderson

#71. In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.

Karl Popper

#72. That's the point. If these Labour MP's were really working men, they'd have some sense. But most of 'em, or at least the ones I've met, seem to be half-baked intellectuals who've specialized in economics or some such dreary muck.

Carter Dickson

#73. Zealots are one-trick ponies. They love nothing so much as their own cause. Don't get in their way without expecting to be hurt.

Patricia Briggs

#74. It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

Sam Harris

#75. Most writers are lazy intellectuals, and it's a goddamn shame because a writer with an audience has a moral responsibility to make readers think about the world in a different way than what they're used to. Why else would you pick up a book if not to inhabit another realm of existence for a while?

Kevin Keck

#76. There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Will Self

#77. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Noam Chomsky

#78. What's with books and soldiers? I wonder. The whole bloody army is turning into pansy intellectuals.

Mohammed Hanif

#79. I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.

Sherwood Anderson

#80. The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.

Alex Pareene

#81. Academics are not intellectuals; they are not curious, they build their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stay securely in them.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#82. Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.

Gary Gutting

#83. Revolution is glorified by intellectuals, apotheosized by poets, sanctified by visionaries, and bled white by politicians.

Ameen Rihani

#84. We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or in the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people.The people don't know we exist.

Ahdaf Soueif

#85. Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#86. Intellectuals are rebels, not revolutionaries.

Cesar Vallejo

#87. [beware that] many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing.

Thomas Sowell

#88. We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#89. What drives intellectuals and professors crazy is somebody with a high school diploma who made a fortune in business. They agree with Lenin, who thought success in business was a matter of luck, when in reality it is a matter of genius.

James Cook

#90. Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

Salman Rushdie

#91. We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

#92. The pen is mightier than the sword unless it's a real sword in which case the guy with the pen should run away fast.

Roger Eschbacher

#93. Atheism or similar charges was not unusual among intellectuals, nor condemned by the masses. The prize-winning plays of Aristophanes were not merely atheist, but made fun of the gods and their prophets and oracles.

Benjamin Jowett

#94. With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

Louis Kronenberger

#95. In Bolivia, the middle class, intellectuals and the self-employed are proud of their Indian roots. Unfortunately, some oligarchic groups continue to treat us as being inferior.

Evo Morales

#96. There is a gulf between the Arab peoples and Arab intellectuals.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#97. Make sure you work at a place which gives you opportunities to learn, travel, explore, interact with intellectuals and new work skills.

Abhishek Ratna

#98. He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#99. The popular element "feels" but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element "knows" but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel.

Antonio Gramsci

#100. It is said that the ignorant are obstructed by ignorance, while the intellectuals are obstructed by intellectual knowledge. One way of getting past these obstacles and approaching inherent knowledge is to let go of whatever comes to mind.

Muso Kokushi