#intellectual

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 like them; but don’t let me hear a word about the rest ↗

— Alfred de Vigny

#politics #nature

All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she as extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity. ↗

— Lewis Hyde

#intellectual-property #art

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

— Ezra Pound

#courage #criticism #intellectuals #opinion #taboos

...She had little patience with people who got intellectually lazy when faced with a difficult concept. ↗

— Beth Fantaskey

#impatient #intellectual #lazy #dating

Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic. ↗

— Alexis Carrel

#absolute #absolute power #allows #belief #clear

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values. ↗

— Gerald Brenan

#ideas #importance #intellectuals #more #other

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#humor #intellectualism #humor

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think. ↗

— Michel Foucault

#elitism #intellectualism #politics #populism #imagination

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#intellectual #political #willful-ignorance #life

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#french-intellectuals #lacan #sartre #life