Intellectual Quotes

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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.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff – well, it might as well be dead.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

Judgment is more than skill. It sets forth on intellectual seas beyond the shores of hard indisputable factual information.

Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life-blood of real civilization.

G. M. Trevelyan

The more a man thinks the better adapted he becomes to thinking, and education is nothing if it is not the methodical creation of the habit of thinking. Precisely. Theoretically, education is a mental training aiming at greater intellectual elasticity, but the question is whether education does not often strain, instead of train, a mind.

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

Anna Garlin Spencer

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

Chauncey Wright

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

Lawrence Lessig

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue; it is an intellectual crime.

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

What man or woman of common sense now doubts the intellectual capacity of colored people? Who does not know, that with all our efforts as a nation to crush and annihilate the mind of this portion of our race, we have never yet been able to do it

Angelina Grimké

For many decades now - and certainly during my adult life in academe - the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology is a pursuit that can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity.

Arthur Peacocke

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm; it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence.... It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Georges Bataille

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.

Theodor W. Adorno

Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.

Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement for herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.