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4a33fab
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My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence. [ : Chapter 19]
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intelligence
intellectuals
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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078a913
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Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it. -
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drinking
idiots
intellectuals
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Ray Bradbury |
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ad0547a
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There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.
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violence
politics
keynesianism
welfare-states
conservatism
united-states
politics-of-the-united-states
economics
law
intellectuals
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Noam Chomsky |
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777ffea
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"To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense, the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule." --
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criticism
intellectual
radicalism
intellectualism
intellectuals
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Richard Hofstadter |
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95642ac
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Two classes of people make up the world: those who have found God, and those who are looking for Him - thirsting, hungering, seeking! And the great sinners came closer to Him than the proud intellectuals! Pride swells and inflates the ego; gross sinners are depressed, deflated and empty. They, therefore, have room for God. God prefers a loving sinner to a loveless 'saint'. Love can be trained; pride cannot. The man who thinks that he knows will rarely find truth; the man who knows he is a miserable, unhappy sinner, like the woman at the well, is closer to peace, joy and salvation than he knows.
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sinners
intellectuals
humility
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Fulton J. Sheen |
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6efbbea
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During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.
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humour
religion
city-councils
croats
david-rieff
islamic-extremism
serbs
sontag
zenica
extremism
bosnia
bosnian-war
muslims
intellectuals
jews
religious-extremism
zealotry
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Christopher Hitchens |
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f27775a
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If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.
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character
intellectual
intellectualism
sentimentality
intellectuals
democracy
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Richard Hofstadter |
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adf8fc0
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"[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."
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the-anointed
social-policy
intellectuals
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Thomas Sowell |
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364e2cd
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My intellect was my greatest vanity.
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intellectualism
intellectuals
vanity
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Dan Simmons |
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cf1aebf
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The intellectual as ideologist, having had a leading role in purveying to the country each innovation and having frequently hastened the country into the acceptance of change, is naturally felt to have played an important part in breaking the mold in which America was cast and in consequence he gets more than his share of the blame.
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intellectualism
intellectuals
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Richard Hofstadter |
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5a3122f
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And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay 'The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.' This rather shallow piece appeared in the magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of , Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, , Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, ! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged 'neo-conservative' movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist and above all anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon it is raised. I wait for the agonised, self-justifying neo-conservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain?
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anti-intellectualism
anti-semitism
authoritarianism
commentary-magazine
debate
delmore-schwartz
dwight-macdonald
james-atlas
jeane-kirkpatrick
leon-trotsky
neoconservativism
new-criterion
new-york-times
norman-podhoretz
obscurantism
partisan-review
ts-eliot
right-wing-politics
george-orwell
manhattan
intellectuals
fundamentalism
patriotism
power
jews
communism
cold-war
new-york
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Christopher Hitchens |
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11cb837
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Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the intellectual's business, but this credits his business too much and not quite enough. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamour; truths long known and widely believed have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are bore and too many of them become half truths. Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.
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happiness
truth
playfulness
playful
intellectual
intellectualism
intellectuals
uncertainty
play
questions
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Richard Hofstadter |
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7b58505
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...there was an impatience in her tone, almost an accusation, as she added that academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.
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intellectuals
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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ad5701d
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In some quarters, and particularly among those who comment on these matters in in political circles or in the media or the blogosphere or other forms of public discussion, there is, without question, a strain of hostility and resentment likely to be encountered by anyone who attempts to characterize and emphasize the value of the intellectual life carried on in universities. Clearly, a wider anti-intellectualism feeds into this, something well charted in the US from at least Richard Hofstadter onwards and brilliantly diagnosed by Thorstein Veblen and others before that. The narrower version of this response finds it pretty outrageous for academics to criticize or complain about anything to do with universities and their support and regulation by their host society. Along with more understandable and even perhaps justifiable sources of these reactions, we do have to recognize - and here is where I know I am particularly laying myself open to misunderstanding - the force of which Nietzche termed . There is a bitterness in these reactions, a combination of anger and sneering, together with a levelling intent, that far exceeds what might seem called for by any actual disagreement about the subject matter. And if I may be allowed to risk a little sally of speculative phenomenology, I think this reaction, for all its hostility and dismissiveness, encodes a twisted acknowledgement that there is something desirable, even enviable, about the role of the scholar or the scientist. Part of the reaction, of course, involves a resentment of the supposed security of tenure in a world with very little security of employment; some of it is a sense of how much autonomy, comparatively speaking, academics have in their working lives, how much flexibility in choosing their working hours and so on, in a world where, again, most people enjoy all too little autonomy. But some of it also may be a kind of grudging acknowledgement that the matters that scholars and scientists work on are more interesting, rewarding and perhaps humanly valuable than the matter most people have to devote their energies too in their working lives. Academics are the object of, simultaneously, envy and resentment because their roles seem to allow them to deal with intrinsically rewarding matters while being financially supported by the labour of others who are not privileged to work on such matters.
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intellectuals
university
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Stefan Collini |
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6a1247b
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The bookshelves were lined with Joan Didion and Flannery O'Connor, a small, unexpected collection of musicalia, essay collections on Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. There was a framed poster of an exhibit of romantic landscape paintings in Dresden. Intellectuals had their own thing going, that was for sure.
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books
music
intellectuals
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Gary Shteyngart |