90 Quotes About Intellectuals

I have always maintained that genuine intellectuals, by definition, refuse to play any institutional games at any stage of their career or intellectual life. They can’t pretend to unsee once they see.

Too much elite education renders a person unpractical. And tell you what? The highly educated people are further away from reality than the less educated ones. I would rather rely on the opinion of a less educated poor person who constantly deals with people, than an overly educated idiot who views this world only through an academic lens while sitting alone on his comfy couch.

You don’t need to be intelligent to be good.

A person of ritual is respected in their own circle, a person of intellect is respected in some circles, a person of love is respected everywhere.

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.

People who are not blessed with the ability to make others laugh compensate for that by saying (or trying to say) things that are profound.

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.

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.

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.