90 Quotes About Intellectuals

A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones.

Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.

Some men, instead of building their existence upon the indefinite unfolding of time, propose to assert it in its eternal aspect & to achieve it as an absolute. They hope, thereby, to surmount the ambiguity of their condition. Thus, many intellectuals seek their salvation in either in critical thought or creative activity.

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.

The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.

The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.

The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical

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.

We have stolen many ideas from many intellectuals we have ever read.