The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie. — Louise Bogan
...Intelligence and character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce something valuable for the community. — Albert Einstein
Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth — Paul Johnson
In the immortal words of George Orwell, 'One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.' — Gad Saad
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. — Susan Sontag
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. — Albert Camus
Twitter is television for intellectuals. — Naval Ravikant
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. — George Steiner
Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac — Timothy Leary
Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them. — Albert Einstein
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. — Noam Chomsky
Intellectual elegance [is] a mind that is continually refining itself with education and knowledge. Intellectual elegance is the opposite of intellectual vulgarity. — Massimo Vignelli
No other religion has come even remotely close to Islam in inspiring, justifying, or supporting terrorism. And yet, the progressive intelligentsia insist that none of these documented attacks have anything to do with Islam. — Gad Saad
The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience. — Lech Walesa
We shall solve this problem, and afterwards Warsaw as the Capital and the pool of intelligentsia of that nation will be destroyed. — Heinrich Himmler
The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses. — Maxim Gorky
People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge. — Thomas Sowell
The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, supporting among the intelligentsia, and - perhaps most important - allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who 'care.' But, if they really cared, they would want to know what the facts are and what the actual consequences of their various nostrums are. — Thomas Sowell
Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve. — Noam Chomsky
Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider. — Diane Abbott
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large. — Thomas Sowell
The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality. — Thomas Sowell
My love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned. — Richard Dawkins
The prosperity and advancement of a nation depend upon its intelligentsia, and Muslim India is looking forward to her young generation and education classes to give a bold lead for our guidance and a brilliant record of histrorical achievements and traditions. — Muhammad Ali Jinnah
The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? — Thomas Sowell
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. — George Orwell
Our society consists exclusively of free working people of cities and villages, workers, peasants, intelligentsia. Each of these strata may have its special interests and express them in numerous existing organizations. — Joseph Stalin
We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me of Sodomand Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad consequences. — Charlie Munger
video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia". — Guillermo del Toro
The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture. — Hu Shih
I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man. — T Bone Burnett
Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change. — Thomas Sowell
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
Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals. — Noam Chomsky
How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? — John Maynard Keynes
Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial. — Ishmael Reed
If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant. — Leon Trotsky
In Europe, people in the arts are considered part of the intelligentsia; they are considered part of the elite. — Ron Silver
My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up. — Alison Bechdel
How is it possible to live in world where people can rule millions of others? It's incredible! It's like we've gone back to the 12th century. That's what happens when you decapitate intelligentsia and repeatedly traumatize and brutalize a country for decades on end: you do not get virtue. Victims do not make nice people. — Jon Lee Anderson
Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that. — Richard Ford
That intellectuals, including academics, would become a "new class" of technocrats, claiming the name of science while cooperating with the powerful, was predicted by [Mikhail] Bakunin in the early days of the formation of the modern intelligentsia in the 19th century. — Noam Chomsky
On the other side, you have the conservative intelligentsia - magazines like National Review, which has a big anti-Trump issue; Weekly Standard editor, conservative talk show hosts - they're mounting a big anti-Trump effort, pro-Cruz effort because they think [Donald] Trump is dangerous and he's not qualified to be commander in chief. — Mara Liasson
It is depressing but not shocking to witness the liberal intelligentsia embrace Ari Shavit so enthusiastically. Shavit is someone who is as consistently wrong as Thomas Friedman on major issues, and at least as much a courtier of power. — Max Blumenthal
The inspiration comes from everywhere, from what I grew up with. There's so much silliness and nonsense in the world that we regard as normal working procedure. The satirical point of the view may be to counterpoint that. The way we look at classics has been hijacked by the intelligentsia - Shakespeare is highbrow and seen as something clever people do, which isn't right at all. I basically pull inspiration from everywhere. — Jasper Fforde
It's among the intelligentsia that we often find the glib compulsion to explain everything and to understand nothing. — Joost Meerloo
Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia. — George Gilder
It is amazing how many of the intelligentsia call it "greed" to want to keep what you have earned, but not greed to want to take away what somebody else has earned, and let politicians use it to buy votes. — Thomas Sowell
Terror, as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the intelligentsia, pacify the professional man of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the field of their specialties. — Leon Trotsky
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