Quotessence
Home / Topics / Intellectuals Quotes

Intellectuals Quotes

Browse 63 quotes about Intellectuals.

Intellectuals Quotes

“Nor were the intellectuals of the 1920s a vanguard of a new outlook, as they themselves supposed, but the exhausted rearguard of Victorian romanticism. They sought refuge from an industrialised and ugly world. Some, like Virginia Woolf, found it in polishing up an exquisite sensibility. Others, like her husband Leonard Woolf and of course Gilbert Murray, found escape in designing an ideal society...It was a sheltered world, this of the intelligentsia of the 1920s, its inhabitants mostly shielded by private means from crude personal reminders of the outside struggle for survival. They circulated at leisure from country house to country cottage...back again to Bloomsbury or one of the ancient universities; convinced that they carried in their luggage the soul of civilisation. The memoirs of the epoch are fragrant with cultured weekends - witty chat on the lawn and brilliant profundity at the dining table. It was a circle of flimsy and precious people, of whom Lady Ottoline Morrell was perhaps the manliest. And so, while not all intellectuals were active pacifists or internationalists, they were generally more concerned with classical French and Greek culture - 'the good life' - than with 'Philistine' matters like industrial and strategic power.”

IntellectualsIntelligentsia
Book:The Collapse of British Power
Create image

“Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most leftwing segment. 28. (fr) The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.”

HostilityAcademiaPostmodernismLeftismSjwIntellectuals1995OversocializationMainstream Morality
Book:Industrial Society and Its Future
Create image

“Needless to say, the self-hatred of Western intellectuals is not genuine or sincere: they do not really want to beat our supermarkets into souks, as swords into ploughshares ... Rather, the intellectual's expression of self-hatred is directed at other Western intellectuals, to prove the self-hater's broadness of mind, moral superiority and lack of prejudice, and thus earn the approval of his peers. It isn't only rebellious youth who experience peer pressure... Unfortunately, insincere ideas can become official orthodoxies, with very real consequences. The Muslims of this country are hardly to blame if they do not realise that the posturings of our intellectuals are just that, posturings, not intended to be taken literally. When the intellectuals of this country express no admiration for or appreciation of the cultural achievements of their civilisation's past, when only denigration and iconoclasm appear to advance an intellectual's career, when moral stature is measured by the vehemence of denunciation of past or present abuses, real or imagined, it is hardly surprising that Muslims conclude that the West is eminently hateful; it must be, because it hates itself. They haven't heard of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.”

SjwIntellectualsRadicals
Author:Theodore Dalrymple
Create image

“I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers. I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals.”

SpiritualityFashionCoffeeFarmersClothingIntellectuals
Author:Mary Rose O'Reilley
Create image

“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.”

ReligionHumourExtremismReligious ExtremismJewsMuslimsBosniaIntellectualsBosnian WarZealotry1990sCroatsSerbsIslamic ExtremismDavid RieffCity CouncilsSontagZenica
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
Create image

“I like the thought of a Scots Republic with Scots Border Guards in saffron kilts - the thought of those kilts can awake me to joy in the middle of the night. I like the thought of Miss Wendy Wood leading a Scots Expeditionary Force down to Westminster the reclaim the Scone Stone: I would certainly march with that expedition myself in spite of the risk of dying of laughter by the way. I like the thought of a Scots Catholic kingdom with Mr. Compton Mackenzie Prime Minister to some disinterred Jacobite royalty, and all the Scots intellectuals settled out on the land on thirty-acre crofts, or sent to St Kilda for the good of their souls and the nation (except the hundreds streaming over the border in panic flight at sight of the Scotland of their dreams).”

IntellectualsKiltsJacobitismLand ReformCompton MackenzieBorder GuardsCroftsWendy Wood
Book:Scottish Scene: or, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Albyn
Create image

“Those sad fucks haven’t a clue. Sticking your nose in a book doesn’t entitle you to call yourself an intellectual. You have to take your ideas to the street, confront the stupid wherever you find them, that’s what Zara says. You must force them to think, to see the power of ideas. Those withered academics hiding away in universities aren’t fooling anyone. They can’t hack it. They don’t encourage thought. They kill it. Zara wants to challenge every professor. That’s what her dissertation says. It’s a rallying call for true intellectuals. Intellect is a savage thing, not some cosy, peaceful pet to be shut away in institutions for the mild-mannered.”

AcademiaIntellectualsIvory TowerMandarinsCareerists
Author:Mike Hockney
Create image

“In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.”

ArtArtistCulturePoliticsSocietyIntellectualActivismPoliticiansArtistsIntellectualismIntellectualsBlack Culture
Author:Harold Cruse
Create image