Top 100 Quotes About Intellectuals
#1. 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.
Elena Ferrante
#2. Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
C.P. Snow
#3. Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.
Abdolkarim Soroush
#4. Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".
George Weigel
#5. Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.
Murray Rothbard
#6. Many Afghan intellectuals in the United States believe that their country is best kept together. They are encouraged by the fact that no leading tribal or political figure there has called for secession.
Stephen Kinzer
#7. 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.
Armando Valladares
#8. My staff is made up of politicians, Rachel, not scientists. You've met Dr. Marlinson. I think he's terrific, but if I let an astrophysicist loose on my team of left-brain, think-inside-the-box intellectuals, I'll end up with a herd of deer in the headlights.
Dan Brown
#9. The library is not just an information center. It's always been a refuge for anyone to come to, whatever status in society. For people, intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, for lonely people. For every walk of life.
Wendy MacNaughton
#10. We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#11. In stark contrast with the views of the Greek philosophers and with those of the rest of western intellectuals to the present day, Chinese Taoist thought always defended individual liberty and laissez-faire while attacking the systematic and coercive use of violence typical of government.
Jesus Huerta De Soto
#12. [Satan] has hundreds of agents writing pornographic literature and producing sex movies to pollute [the mind]. He has intellectuals in high positions teaching a hedonistic and permissive philosophy ... They lack an anchor for their real self.
Billy Graham
#13. Intellectuals tend to be arrogant. Intelligence, like money, is a good servant but a bad master. When practicing pranayama, the yogi [makes] himself humble and without pride in his intellectual attainments.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#14. Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.
Daniel Barenboim
#15. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.
George Orwell
#16. There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.
Peter York
#17. If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
#18. There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.
Ken Follett
#19. Revolutionary intellectuals have the historic mission of inventing the vocabulary and the themes for the next tyranny.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#20. My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.
Rashid Johnson
#21. Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.
Rebecca West
#22. No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!
Vladimir Lenin
#23. There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.
Mary Antin
#24. Conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, while the value-oriented are punished in one way or another. The
Noam Chomsky
#25. In a society without security and stability, there are no intellectuals or businessmen or artists. When man is constantly in fight-or-flight mode he is no better than an animal, with no chance for ideas to be nurtured or dreams to be pursued.
Amish Tripathi
#26. He had the same trouble as all intellectuals - he was ineffectual. He knew too many things, and they confused him.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#27. Humanism is not a pompous philosophy to be talked and debated about by a handful of intellectuals - it is the purest form of moral compass, which defines the civilized heart of thinking humanity.
Abhijit Naskar
#28. Despite, or because of their faith in miraculous cures, a strain of superstitious belief ran through this proud, emotionally distant family of intellectuals.
Meryle Secrest
#30. The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as to direct the thought of most of the world - primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.
Noam Chomsky
#31. Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
Roger Scruton
#32. What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.
George Orwell
#33. To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#34. America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.
Neil Postman
#35. The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.
Philip Zaleski
#36. Intellectuals are people who go to study things other people do naturally.
Bill Cosby
#37. Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.
Aldous Huxley
#38. But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn't instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.
Howard Jacobson
#39. Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future.
Paola Antonelli
#40. The experiment of multiculturalism was thought up in the minds of tenured intellectuals, put on paper by virtue signaling politicians, and then enjoyed by big business globalists.
Lauren Southern
#41. Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.
Nancy Pearcey
#42. Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion.
Dennis Prager
#43. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.
Noam Chomsky
#44. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That's why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome.
Aldous Huxley
#45. Intellectuals and celebrities venerated monsters like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, & Ho Chi Minh. The New Left of the 1960s didn't have a change of heart, just a change of icons from Stalin to third world tyrants. The homicidal and sadistic Che Guevara is still held up as a hero ...
Jamie Glazov
#46. If nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, nothing is more harmful than an idea which is manipulated by motivated men. Rogues and crooks have ideas. So do ordinary folks. But intellectuals are meant to be a breed apart for the same reason rocks aren't gems.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
#47. The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.
Jacob Burckhardt
#48. The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.
Thomas Sowell
#49. Journalists are usually quite jealous people, especially of intellectuals who are supposed to be in fashion.
Vivienne Westwood
#50. You know, it's one thing about intellectuals, they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on.
Woody Allen
#51. Humans and their governments have effectively neutered the population to the point that they're just skinbags, mouth-breathers and pseudo-intellectuals repeating political, religious or academic rhetoric that they don't even understand!
Brad McKinniss
#52. Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth
Paul Johnson
#53. You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals - and even heads of state - they all say: 'Nigeria is a big disappointment. It is the shame of the African continent.'
Wole Soyinka
#54. 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.
John Brockman
#55. He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot - a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.
John Green
#56. Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.
Raymond Aron
#57. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.
Ian McEwan
#58. There's nothing new about European anti-Americanism. To go to a dinner party of intellectuals in Paris in 1960 was like walking into a tiger's den with a piece of raw meat in your hands.
Charles McCarry
#59. Western intellectual Islamologists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam.
Wafa Sultan
#60. Intellectuals that approach me, only serve to feeding my intellectualism. Imaginists that approach me, only serve to enhancing my Imaginism. It's impossible to feed my I, for I am the Greatest 'I AM.
Lionel Suggs
#61. The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.
Witold Gombrowicz
#62. The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
#63. A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.
Daniel J. Levitin
#64. When I find a woman attractive, I have nothing at all to say. I simply watch her smile. Intellectuals take apart her face in order to explain it bit by bit, but they no longer see the smile.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#65. So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography.
Ben Aaronovitch
#66. The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
Aldous Huxley
#67. Fraser's mother, Janice, was actually quite a happy soul but she had to hide it because, like all pseudo intellectuals, she thought being cheery made her look stupid, which of course she was for believing that rubbish in the first place.
She like to talk about Sartre sometimes, just as insurance.
Craig Ferguson
#68. Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.
Sue Hubbell
#69. We let 50,000 Jewish intellectuals get across the border. Just as I wanted Lebensraum for Germany, I thought Jews should have a Lebensraum for themselves
outside of Germany.
Alfred Rosenberg
#71. There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical current among bourgeois intellectuals. (1949)
Gyorgy Lukacs
#72. Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#73. I allowed myself to be taken in by the intellectuals. I believed too much in the Polish intellectuals and followed their advice.
Lech Walesa
#74. Relativism is one of the many crimes committed by intellectuals. It is a betrayal of reason and of humanity.
Karl R. Popper
#75. Multiculturalism asserts that all cultures are equal and therefore none may criticize another; intellectuals and politicians are therefore reluctant to declare the obvious superiority of Western culture to Islamic culture.
Edwin A. Locke
#77. National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds.
George F. Will
#78. 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.
Roy Blount Jr.
#79. So-called intellectuals conceptualize love; fools just love.
Fools breathe air; intellectuals (so called) breathe ego.
Saurabh Sharma
#80. 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
#81. Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.
Terry Teachout
#82. Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.
Susie Orbach
#83. For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own.
Anthony Daniels
#84. Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno
#85. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit.
J. Budziszewski
#86. There has been no major revolution in modern history without intellectuals; conversely there has been no major counterrevolutionary movement without intellectuals. Intellectuals have been the fathers and mothers of movements, and of course sons and daughters, even nephews and nieces.
Edward W. Said
#87. There is a long dishonourable tradition of western intellectuals who have been duped by Moscow. The list includes Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, and Andre Gide.
Luke Harding
#88. Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.
Thomas Sowell
#89. Quintana had known Tubbs since high school; Tubbs had been one of the slightly nerdy intellectuals on the edge of the popular clique, while Quintana had been metal shop and a football lineman.
John Sandford
#90. Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.
Diana Trilling
#91. Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals' ideological riots sometimes kill millions.
John McCarthy
#92. North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root.
Barbara Demick
#93. In his 1978 Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn listed a litany of woes facing the West: the loss of courage and will, the addiction to comfort, the abuse of freedom, the capitulation of intellectuals to fashionable ideas, the attitude of appeasement with evil.
Charles W. Colson
#94. Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
Thomas Sowell
#95. The man who succeeds is the man who is able to reduce problems to their simplest terms and who has the courage of his convictions - despite the objections of intellectuals. The courage to speak, perhaps, even when he believes that what he is suggesting sounds like madness.
Philip Kerr
#96. I think that intellectuals who end up in hell will have to read page proofs and check indexes there.
Edward Teller
#97. The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.
Theodore White
#98. The conceit of literary intellectuals is to imagine that other people don't have ideas so that they can assume a superior status by having their own...
Nicholas Mosley
#99. Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.
Douglas Sirk
