Intellectuals Quotes

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character.

character

To be honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. That is the intellectual's problem in a nutshell.

I too had thoughts once of being an intellectual, but I found it too difficult.

Intellectuals incline to be individualists, or even independents, are not team conscious and tend to regard obedience as a surrender of personality.

authority obedience

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue; it is an intellectual crime.

commitment

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.

footnotes

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word "Intellectual" suggests straight away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now, post-postmodernism, that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

rational thinking

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.

Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity.  God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words.

Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the lifeblood of real civilization.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is.  He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

People who refer to themselves as intellectuals are automatically commiting a social crime and, also, an error.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.

If a doorman calls you an asshole, you're an asshole. If an intellectual calls you an asshole, you may be a saint.