#intellectuals

We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress. ↗

— David Frum

#business #congress #conservative #decisions #excuses

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

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed. ↗

— Manuel Puig

#countries #give #hope #instability #intellectuals

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals. ↗

— Edmund Wilson

#marxism #opium

It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection. ↗

— Antonio Tabucchi

#doubt #intellectuals #job #perfection #writers

Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain 'equality'--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#communism #socialism #western-intellectuals #equality

I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers. I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals. ↗

— Mary Rose O'Reilley

#coffee #farmers #fashion #intellectuals #spirituality

Don't make art for other artists or for 'intellectuals', make art for people - and if you can touch just one person in a lifetime and make a difference - you have succeeded. ↗

— Ray Conniff

#artists #difference #intellectuals #just #just one

We sensible often resist intrusive love and its chaos practically, employing measures to prevent the former for fear of the latter. But for all our wit and work, that desperation for control also prevents the pure, transcendental freedom more often delivered by both. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#control #desperation #freedom #love #lover