#intellectuals

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

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

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will. ↗

— Eric Hoffer

#oligarchy #tyranny #experience

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

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

Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals' ideological riots sometimes kill millions. ↗

— John McCarthy

#intellectuals #kill #millions #most #riots

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#explanation #genetics #intellectuals #invokes #mind

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#arts #believe #confusion #elite #endeavor

Intellectuals would be much more accepted now than in the '40s. ↗

— Parker Stevenson

#intellectuals #more #much #now #than

Intellectuals are useless, and as a pseudo-intellectual I can't help but envy the practicality of that. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #pseuso-intellectuals #uselessness #funny