90 Quotes About Intellectuals

The workers, once the heroes of historical negativity, have become the transparent unemployed workforce of factories that are but simulacra. The intellectual, once the herald of historical negativity, has become the transparent clown of dissidence.

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 longer could do so, they tried to justify them.

Beware of intellectuals who make monotheism out of their theories of motivation.

This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

The realization that you can't predict the future -- and mold it -- could only come as a shock to an academic.

To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.

Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.

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 to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.

Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth