90 Quotes About Intellectuals

من هو المثقف؟ بشكل عام هو شخص كرّس نفسه لما يسمى «حياة العقل»، أي التفكير ليس بوصفه أداة أو وسيلة لتحقيق أغراض عملية، وإنما بقصد المعرفة والفهم

What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the “life of the mind”: thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding.

Even in the most favourable periods for cultural development , Intellectuals tend to have uneasy relationship with the status quo.

Intellectuals are not defined according to the jobs they do, but [by] the manner in which they act, the way they see themselves, and the values that they uphold.

He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.

Intellectuals are a pretty unique species all by themselves, given to advocating things out of sheer brazenness that they could not themselves stomach if they were ushered in to witness the scene.

Intellectuals are now typically public employees, even if they work for nominally private institutions or foundations. Almost completely protected from the vagaries of consumer demand ("tenured"), their number has dramatically increased and their compensation is on average far above their genuine market value. At the same time the quality of their intellectual output has constantly fallen.

Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick.

Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as""the spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility.