#intellectuals

I realised quite early on that, although I wasn't trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals. ↗

— Benedict Cumberbatch

#career #early #i #intellectuals #make

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#conservatism #economics #intellectuals #keynesianism #law

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

I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being. ↗

— Leonid Borodin

#intellectualism #intellectuals #posturing #pretense #faith

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

Intellect is not wisdom. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#society #intellect

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#geniuses #intellectuals #prevent #problems #solve