I'm quite happy to be an anti-intellectual, actually. It is the modern equivalent of anticlericalism, and it is long overdue. One can oppose specific institutions without opposing thought in general. In fact, sometimes it is even necessary.

There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party.

[Anti-monopoly] is a movement inspired by a set of fools and black-mailers. To be sure, there are some men in it whose motives are good, if their sense is not. When I want to buy up any politician, I always find the Anti-Monopolists the most purchasable. They don't come so high.

At the core of anti-Fascist rhetoric as deployed by the official Left was a simple binary view of political allegiance: we are what they are not. They (the Fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, Nationalists) are Right, we are Left. They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good. In the words of Klaus Mann, in Paris in 1935: whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against it. Since most of the anti-Fascists’ opponents made a point of defining their own politics as above all anti-Communist (this was part of Nazism’s wartime appeal to conservative elites in countries as far apart as Denmark and Romania), this tidy symmetry worked to the Communists’ polemical advantage. Philo-Communism, or at least anti-anti-Communism, was the logical essence of anti-Fascism.

To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

"To oppose something is to maintain it.
They say here "all roads lead to Mishnory." To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk in a different road."

To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

Being anti-slavery simply meant you didn’t agree with slavery; being an abolitionist meant you’d crossed a bridge inside yourself, from “I don’t agree” to “Not on my watch.” Which are you in relation to a corporate aristocracy that has corrupted our govt and eroded our democracy?

He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: "I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival." . . . His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted. Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain, straightforward man, a surgeon by profession--how could he have let himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary, low creature.

R.G.: The more people think that they are realizing the Utopias dreamed up by their desire – in other words, the more they embrace ideologies of liberation – the more they will in fact be working to reinforce the competitive world that is stifling them. But they do not realize their mistake; and continue to systematically confuse the type of external obstacle represented by the prohibition and the internal obstacle formed by the mimetic partner...
At the very moment the last prohibitions are being forgotten, there are still a number of intellectuals who continue to refer to them as if they were more and more crippling...
G.L.: You are going to get yourself branded as a dreadful reactionary again.
R.G.: That would not be at all fair. I do find it absurd that people should greet with a fanfare the liberation of a desire that is not being constrained by anyone. But I find it even more absurd to hear people calling for a return to constraints, which is impossible. From the moment cultural forms begin to dissolve, any attempt to reconstitute them artificially can only result in the most appalling tyranny.