Intellectuals Quotes

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I grew up in this house of intellectuals, and for me, it wasn’t, like, a negative thing. And what I’ve discovered is, for a lot of people, it is. But I think knowing history, liking to talk about ideas – like, I just genuinely like to geek out and go on these intellectual thought journeys.

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.’

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

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

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.

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.

The majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the ‘intellectuals.’

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century for black writers, artists, and intellectuals as much as it was for their white counterparts.

The so-called intellectuals don’t like my films.

Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I like being surrounded by students and intellectuals.

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.

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.

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

I allowed myself to be taken in by the intellectuals. I believed too much in the Polish intellectuals and followed their advice.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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

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.

We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.

Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.

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.

Intellectuals that read a lot of books might not have been interested in Mobb Deep before ‘My Infamous Life,’ but now they might go, ‘Who are these guys?’ and check us out.

MGR’s rule took care of the poor, the downtrodden, and the middle class. I have faith that I, too, can provide that rule. With the help of technology and the support of youngsters, resourceful people, and intellectuals, I, too, can provide that kind of a rule.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

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.’

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?

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.

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

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.’

Many intellectuals feel themselves to be Supermen who are spokesmen for the people. But in my opinion, they’re to be pitied. Under Mao’s dictatorship, these poor sheep suffered the same fate as everyone else.

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.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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