Top 100 Intellectuals Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Intellectuals Quotes from famous people such as Robert Nozick, Ray Conniff, Hubert Burda, Louis Garrel, Frankie Boyle, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the sa

Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.
Robert Nozick
Don’t make art for other artists or for ‘intellectuals’, make art for people – and if you can touch just one person in a lifetime and make a difference – you have succeeded.
Ray Conniff
Frank Schirrmacher’s passing is a great loss. Among the intellectuals, he, along with Friedrich Kittler, was the only one who understood the philosophical dimensions of the Internet.
Hubert Burda
I like being surrounded by students and intellectuals.
Louis Garrel
We live in a country where posting ‘Let’s riot or something bruv!’ on Facebook will get you a couple of years in prison, while writing a column saying we should bomb Syria is practically an entrance exam for public intellectuals.
Frankie Boyle
Conservative voters tend to believe that the ‘climate change’ agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.
Roger Scruton
Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.
Rodney Stark
Just as Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin started by going after the intellectuals, against those whose words who might form an opposition to them, so Trump has gone across us. Free speech is first among equals when we look at what is being violated by this new regime.
Andrew Solomon
You have to understand that the I.D.W. emerged as a response to a world where perfectly reasonable intellectuals were being regularly mislabeled by activists, institutions, and mainstream journalists with every career-ending epithet from ‘Islamophobe’ to ‘Nazi.’
Eric Weinstein
Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren’t. Harry Truman wasn’t.
Michael Ignatieff
Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.
Noam Chomsky
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
When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests, and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?
Jamal Khashoggi
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’
Steven Pinker
Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
Manuel Puig
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
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
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor W. Adorno
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
Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
I think Britain is a little better at bringing intellectuals into discourse than America, where I’m from. Though I would say, perhaps, that the U.K. prefers its intellectualism to be entertaining.
Lionel Shriver
It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
Richard Hofstadter
Intellectuals are people who manage the world in their head. They look at life and try to see some kind of truth, and if they cannot find it, they attempt to create it.
Yair Lapid
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
Steven Pinker
What we’re looking for at my school is intellectuals. People who want to talk about the art and be knowledgeable about it. People who want to know the history. Not everybody needs to be performing.
Savion Glover
My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.
Sara Paretsky
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
The people on my mum’s side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad’s side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.
Evangeline Lilly
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
I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.
Andrew Sean Greer
After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country.
Hu Shih
Intellectuals know how to answer the question, 'What Go

Intellectuals know how to answer the question, ‘What God do I believe in?’ not only through the question of ‘What God do I abhor?’ Intellectuals can also answer the question of ‘What flag do I wave?’ without having to answer the question of ‘What flag do I burn.’
Yair Lapid
Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people’s values.
Gerald Brenan
I’m not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice… It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.
Frank McCourt
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
The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It’s too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.
Elfriede Jelinek
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.
Andie MacDowell
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
‘Capitalism’ is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
Steven Pinker
The war industry people are very together; they know exactly what they want; they don’t even have to talk to each other. The peace industry people are just intellectuals who are very critical of each other… Unless the peace industry is powerful, we’re always going to have war. It is as simple as that.
Yoko Ono
I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers.
Li Lu
The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.
Charles Murray
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.
Naomi Alderman
I think I’ll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.
Tony Kushner
The strange proposition that black intellectuals – regardless of their training – are ‘race experts’ mainly because they are black is naive and potentially dangerous.
Carl Hart
My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.
Alvin Toffler
Intellectuals and creative people, once they start talking about God they get put into this other category: ‘I don’t go to people’s music like that to understand my life.’
David Berman
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
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
Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion’s imminent demise.
Jonathan Sacks
Journalists are usually quite jealous people, especially of intellectuals who are supposed to be in fashion.
Vivienne Westwood
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
And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.
Juan Goytisolo
Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.
Chesa Boudin
Intellectuals would be much more accepted now than in the ’40s.
Parker Stevenson
Wasn’t the Treaty of Versailles, wasn’t that disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pro-Holocaust.
Gavin McInnes
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Sam Harris
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
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
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
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
I don’t like intellectuals, or, at least, people who call themselves that way, because I am under the impression that there is always something condescending in their demeanour, and I don’t like condescending people.
Carine Roitfeld
Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who want

Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.
Brad Holland
France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they’re valued.
Theodore Zeldin
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
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
One can see the professionals and intellectuals talking to their rural brethren with an amused and condescending smile. They forget that but for the toiling rural masses, all their professional training and erudition would collapse like a castle of cards.
Sanjay Gandhi
Certainly the party counts a considerable number of intellectuals among its members, but I am by no means disposed to apologise for that.
Harry Oppenheimer
Venezuelan interests are to be defended by Venezuela. The U.S. should defend the interests of the U.S. Where are the U.S. people, where are the intellectuals, who could put limits on their government?
Hugo Chavez
In the 1920s, big names in the Arab world spoke of Scheherazade as an example for intellectuals fighting for their rights. She was a fighter for the right of free expression.
Fatema Mernissi
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Marcel Proust
Some people spend their time reasoning and thinking out everything, and so anything that cannot be fully understood, they will not accept. We call these people ‘intellectuals.’
Mother Angelica
Authority has to exist before it can be limited, and it is authority that is in scarce supply in those modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.
Ferdinand Marcos
Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.
Bill Alexander
Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it’s stranger than non-fiction as well.
Brad Holland
Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood – not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.
Jodi Kantor
Everybody loves Vegas, and everybody puts it down, especially intellectuals and artists. We have to rub our feet on it, but we’re all secretly thrilled to be there.
Robert Lepage
In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals’ ideological riots sometimes kill millions.
John McCarthy
There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.
Peter York
Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.
Margaret Anderson
Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism.
Hari Kunzru
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
I don’t think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it’s something they can use. It’s not something they live.
Mark Fuhrman
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
The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.
Noam Chomsky
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
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
Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution ‘to each according to his merit or value.’
Robert Nozick
All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it’s another world. It’s filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers – all kinds of people.
Flea
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
You had to do some club after school and it was either the sports or the intellectuals. And right smack in the middle was the acting thing for all the outcasts, which I fell into pretty easily.
David Hewlett
Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.
Michael Ignatieff
There are not many intellectuals left of Harold Pinter'

There are not many intellectuals left of Harold Pinter’s stature who dare raise their voices – and with such force – against the menace of U.S. and the unrestricted use of its power. Pinter’s voice is an unceasing thunder.
Gioconda Belli
Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.
Roxane Gay
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
I believe in the romantic interchange between intellectuals about fashion.
Virgil Abloh
It’s the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.
Antonio Tabucchi
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
There is a gulf between the Arab peoples and Arab intellectuals.
Tahar Ben Jelloun