#intellectualism

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

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth. ↗

— Evelyn Underhill

#intellectualism #mysticism #art

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. ↗

— George Orwell

#absurd

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#give #give me #intellectualism #me #mechanism

Only here, because of the illusion of intellectualism, our society separates the validity of human expression. ↗

— Joseph Jarman

#expression #here #human #illusion #intellectualism

Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of the Age of Intellect is the unconscious growth of the idea that the human brain can solve the problems of the world. Even on the low level of practical affairs this is patently untrue. Any small human activity, the local bowls club or the ladies’ luncheon club, requires for its survival a measure of self-sacrifice and service on the part of the members. In a wider national sphere, the survival of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self‑sacrifice of the citizens. The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse. ↗

— John Bagot Glubb

#history #intellectualism #sacrifice #service #age

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has 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

#ignorance #life