The People’s’ historic duty was to become a nameless herd and submit to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals.

And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish...

If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought...

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...

Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and...

Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.

That thing that is sometimes called the responsibility of intellectuals is the responsibility of every decent person.

Those intellectuals are our natural enemies; the only kind who are worth anything are the musicians and the dancers: they don’t insult anybody with their performances, and they neither sing nor dance politics. So I...

has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in the epoch-making program.

El político puede pagarle al intelectual. Pero no puede confiar en él. El intelectual acabará por disentir y para el político esta será siempre una traición. Malicioso o ingenuo, maquiavélico o utópico, el poderoso siempre...

I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge or people who have knowledge! I don’t give a damn for anyone’s aggregation of facts,...

I say to the young, the workers, the peasants, the intellectuals and the middle classes: I will stand by your side and support your causes and ambitions,

My favourite definition of an intellectual: ‘Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]

A healthy man watched what he ate. An intelligent man watched what he watched.

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...

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand...

Intellectuals are rarely successful as leaders. They are so trapped in their ideals that they cannot venture out in the real world to win and lead.

Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if...

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 New York Times magazine, and...

What never fails inside the mind of an intellectual never works outside the confines of his head. The world’s stubborn refusal to vindicate the intellectual’s theories serves as proof of humanity’s irrationality, not his own....

We are putting our most valuable intellectual property on the table.

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...

One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That’s where we practical fellows’- he smiled-‘are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and...

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...

Over intellect will make you a genius, over emotions will make you a lunatic.

Intellect is not wisdom.

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and...

Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.

The popular element “feels” but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element “knows” but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel.

What is fascinating is that it is physical. You know, that’s one thing about intellectuals, they’ve proved that you can be absolute brilliant and have no idea what’s going on. But on the other hand,...

A wise man’s goal shouldn’t be to say something profound, but to say something useful.

We own the intellectual property.

The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism’s crimes. When they no...

A professional headshot in front of a bookshelf says you’re an intellectual. A professional headshot peeking though a bookshelf says you’re probably under a restraining order.

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

In the most secret heart of every intellectual … there lies hidden … the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.

Atheism or similar charges was not unusual among intellectuals, nor condemned by the masses. The prize-winning plays of Aristophanes were not merely atheist, but made fun of the gods and their prophets and oracles.

I like to go to Starbucks and watch the intellectuals. I observe them and their intellectualness. They in turn observe me drinking coffee and being a creeper.

The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find...

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,...

Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.