31 Quotes Tagged: intellectual

In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.

If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.

What he [the intellectual] should learn to do is to put what he has been able to salvage from the disciplines that taught him universal techniques, directly at the service of the masses. Intellectuals must learn to understand the universal that the masses want, in reality, in the immediate, at this very moment.

How can one make the best of one’s life? By converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought.

"In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor."

The intellectual as ideologist, having had a leading role in purveying to the country each innovation and having frequently hastened the country into the acceptance of change, is naturally felt to have played an important part in breaking the mold in which America was cast and in consequence he gets more than his share of the blame.

"To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense, the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule."

The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.

Fear breeds superstition.

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn

We still have not defined the intellectual yet: all we have are technicians of practical knowledge who either accommodate themselves to their contradiction or manage to avoid suffering from it. But when one of them becomes aware of the fact that despite the universality of his work it serves only particular interests, then his awareness of this contradiction - what Hegel called an 'unhappy consciousness' - is precisely what characterizes him as an intellectual.

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors [...] I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey' stuff, she was right, there was nothing there. And it was understood by the people who run the political system, and so it's no great secret that the US electoral system is mainly a public relations extravaganza...it's sort of a marketing affair.

To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual.