#intellectual

The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. ↗

— Susan Jacoby

#age

Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying," Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. "It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#anger

Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me? ↗

— John Kennedy Toole

#ass #attitude #contempt #curmudgeon #hilarious

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised. ↗

— Gregory B. Sadler

#christian-thought #discipline #intellect #intellectual-life #theology

Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. (p. 19) ↗

— Robin R. Meyers

#faith #faith

The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated. ↗

— Criss Jami

#complication #genius #intelligence #practicality #practicality-for-intellectuals

In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#gallows-humour #hanged #insult #intellectual #life

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. ↗

— Dan Rather

#listen #lone #lone ranger #overture #ranger

She was no intellectual, but men were scrupulous about avoiding intellectual women unless they had the sense to keep it well hidden. ↗

— Margaret Way

#men #smart #women #men

Among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassé. ↗

— Ross Douthat

#intellectualism #zeitgeist #religion