My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.
My childhood in Arlington, Va., a middle class suburb of Washington, was uneventful. Ours was a very intellectual family, and we were encouraged to read at a very early age.
Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion.
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!
Although all the good arts serve to draw man's mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.
Great art would have 'head': it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have 'heart' in that it would have passion and heart and soul. And it would have 'hand' in that it would be greatly crafted.
My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence. [ : Chapter 19]
Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves; it is the handiwork of terror.
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
Intellectual death is endemic in areas where people are unprepared to obtain new information for development. Learning is a way of staying alive.
The thing no one understood about Gwendolyn Reese was that she was three ages at once: thirty chronologically, forty-five intellectually and fifteen experientially.
Despite, or because of their faith in miraculous cures, a strain of superstitious belief ran through this proud, emotionally distant family of intellectuals.
Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others.
Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.
How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.
Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.
I’m not mean to everybody. I’m only mean to people whose intellectual level is awfully lower than mine.
There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.