Top 100 Intellectuals Quotes

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.

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.

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.

I like being surrounded by students and intellectuals.

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.

Conservative voters tend to believe that the ‘climate change’ agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.

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.

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.

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.’

Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren’t. Harry Truman wasn’t.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

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.

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?

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.’

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

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.

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.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

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.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government.

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.

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.

The strange proposition that black intellectuals – regardless of their training – are ‘race experts’ mainly because they are black is naive and potentially dangerous.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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

Journalists are usually quite jealous people, especially of intellectuals who are supposed to be in fashion.

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.’

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.

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.

Intellectuals would be much more accepted now than in the ’40s.

Wasn’t the Treaty of Versailles, wasn’t that disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pro-Holocaust.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they’re valued.

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.

Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.

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.

Certainly the party counts a considerable number of intellectuals among its members, but I am by no means disposed to apologise for that.

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?

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.

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

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals’ ideological riots sometimes kill millions.

There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.

Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.

Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism.

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.

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.

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.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

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.

Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.

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.

I believe in the romantic interchange between intellectuals about fashion.

It’s the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

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.

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